On-Demand : pay as you go
- Short workload, predictable pricing
- Linux - billing per second after the first minute
- All other OS (Win) - billing per hour
- Highest Cost but no up front payment
- No long term commitment
- Recommended for short term and uninterrupted workloads, where you can't predict how the application will behave.
Reserved (1 Year or 3 Years)
- Long Workload, upto 75% discount compared to On-Demand
- Convertible : can change the EC2 type. long workload with flexible instances
- Scheduled : eg. every Thursday between 9 to 5
- Reserved period : 1 year and 3 years
- Purchasing options: no upfront | partial upfront | all upfront
- Recommended for steady-state usage applications (think DB)
Spot Instances
- Short workloads, cheap, can lose instances (less reliable)
- Recommended for : batch jobs, data analysis, image processing, distributed load
- workloads with flexible start and end time
Dedicated Host
- Book an entire physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use., control instance placement
- Recommended for eg. compliance requirements and reduced cost in server bound licensing.
- 3 yr period reservation
Dedicated Instances
- Instances running on hardware dedicated to you
- May share hardware with other instances in same account
- No control over placement (can move hardware after stop/start)
- per instance billing
- No visibility to sockets, cores, host id
- No targeted instance placement.
Main Instance Types
- R: RAM
- C: CPU / Compute
- M: Medium between RAM and CPU
- I: good I/O
- G: GPU - Video rendering /ML
- T2/T3: Burstable instance
- T2/T3 : unlimited burst