When working with one of the major cloud service providers, you often find yourself wondering what is the different between the virtual machine instance type and which type should you choose?The short answer – pick an instance type according to your business needs.
The long answer – read the rest of this post and pick the best instance type.
The variety of instance types keep changing, but the basic families’ remains the same.
General Purpose
Balanced CPU-to-memory ratio. Ideal for testing and development, small to medium databases, and low to medium traffic web servers.
Example of machine types:
Compute Optimized
High CPU-to-memory ratio. Good for medium traffic web servers, network appliances, batch processes, and application servers.
Example of machine types:
Memory Optimized
High memory-to-core ratio. Good for high performance databases, in-memory databases (e.g. SAP HANA) and memory intensive applications.
Storage Optimized
Deliver high disk throughput, and a balance of compute and memory. Good for distributed file systems such as HDFS, network file systems, log or data processing applications such as Apache Kafka, and big data workload clusters.
Accelerated Computing
Compute and graphics-intensive workloads (GPU). Good for machine/deep learning, high performance computing, computational fluid dynamics, computational finance, seismic analysis, speech recognition, autonomous vehicles.
For further and up-to-date information about machine types, see:
- AWS:
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ - Azure:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/linux/ - Google Cloud Platform:
https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-types
Eyal Estrin
Eyal Estrin is a Cloud Architect.
He joined IUCC in December 2017 and his main focus is promoting and supporting cloud services in Universities in Israel. He brings with him more than 20 years of experience in the IT and information security field.
Follow him at @eyalestrin