Amazon EC2 is a great service but sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the virtual machine types that are provided. Jeff Barr put together a handy comprehensive backgrounder to Amazon EC2 instance families and types:
Over the past six or seven years I have had the opportunity to see customers of all sizes use Amazon EC2 to power their applications, including high traffic web sites, Genome analysis platforms, and SAP applications. I have learned that the developers of the most successful applications and services use a rigorous performance testing and optimization process to choose the right instance type(s) for their application.
In order to help you to do this for your own applications, I’d like to review some important EC2 concepts and then take a look at each of the instance types that make up the EC2 instance family.
Even better he covers the intended use cases for each family and their designed performance tradeoffs. Keep it in your back pocket if you’re an EC2 hacker.