Amazon EC2 Instance Lifecycle

EC2 instances are a combination of virtual processors (vCPUs), memory, network, and in some cases, instance storage and graphics processing units (GPUs). When you create an EC2 instance, you need to choose how much you need of each of these components.

AWS offers a variety of instances that differ based on performance. Some instances provide you with more capacity and others provide less. To get an overview of the capacity details for a particular instance, you should look at the instance type. Instance types consist of a prefix identifying the type of workloads they’re optimized for, followed by a size. For example, the instance type c5.large can be broken down into the following elements.

• c5 determines the instance family and generation number. Here, the instance belongs to the fifth generation of instances in an instance family that’s optimized for generic computation.
• large, which determines the amount of instance capacity.