thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

Cloud Computing · Intermediate

EC2 Instance Types

Named EC2 configurations of vCPU, memory, storage and networking grouped into families such as general purpose, compute and memory optimized.

Definition

EC2 instance types follow a naming pattern of family, generation, optional attributes and size, for example m7g.large (general purpose, 7th generation, Graviton). Families include general purpose (M, T), compute optimized (C), memory optimized (R, X), storage optimized (I, D) and accelerated computing (P, G, Inf, Trn). T-family burstable instances earn CPU credits.

Example

Choosing c7i.xlarge for a CPU-bound video encoding job and r7i.2xlarge for an in-memory cache.

Exam tip

Match the workload to the family letter: C for compute, R for memory, I for high I/O, P/G for GPU; T instances can exhaust CPU credits under sustained load.

Related terms