© 2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

Adam Boeglin, HPC Solutions Architect

Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Choosing the Right EC2 Instance and Applicable Use Cases

Understanding the factors that going into choosing an EC2 instance

Defining system performance and how it is characterized for different workloads

A look into our current generation instances and their features

How Amazon EC2 instances deliver performance while providing flexibility and agility

How to make the most of your EC2 instance experience through the lens of several instance types

What to Expect from the Session

Host ServerHypervisor

Guest 1 Guest 2 Guest n

Amazon EC2 Instances

In the past

First launched in August 2006 M1 Instance

“One size fits all” M1

Amazon EC2 Instances History

2006 2008 2010 2012 20142016

m1.small

m1.largem1.xlarge

c1.mediumc1.xlarge

m2.xlarge

m2.4xlargem2.2xlarge

cc1.4xlarge

t1.micro

cg1.4xlarge

cc2.8xlarge

m1.medium

hi1.4xlarge

m3.xlargem3.2xlarge

hs1.8xlarge

cr1.8xlarge

c3.largec3.xlarge

c3.2xlargec3.4xlargec3.8xlargeg2.2xlarge

i2.xlargei2.2xlargei2.4xlargei2.4xlarge

m3.mediumm3.large

r3.larger3.xlarger3.2xlarge

r3.4xlarger3.8xlarge

t2.microt2.smallt2.med

c4.largec4.xlargec4.2xlargec4.4xlargec4.8xlarge

d2.xlarged2.2xlarged2.4xlarged2.8xlarge

g2.8xlarge

t2.largem4.large

m4.xlargem4.2xlargem4.4xlargem4.10xlarge

x1.32xlarge

t2.nano

m4.16xlarge

p2.xlargep2.8xlargep2.16xlarge

x1.16xlarger4.larger4.xlarger4.2xlarger4.4xlarger4.8xlarger4.16xlarget2.xlarget2.2xlarge

2015

Instance generation

c4.largeInstance family

Instance size

Choices and Flexibility

Choice of Processor Memory Storage Options Accelerated Graphics Burstable Performance

Servers are hired to do jobs Performance is measured differently depending on the job

Hiring a Server

?

Performance Factors

Resource Performance factors Key indicatorsCPU Sockets, number of cores, clock

frequency, bursting capabilityCPU utilization, run queue length

Memory Memory capacity Free memory, anonymous paging, thread swapping

Network interface

Max bandwidth, packet rate Receive throughput, transmit throughput over max bandwidth

Disks Input / output operations per second, throughput

Wait queue length, device utilization, device errors

Acceleration FPGA or GPU offloading from CPU Parallelism and Code Design

Broad Set of Compute Instance Types

M4

General purpose

Computeoptimized

C4

C3

Storage and I/O

optimized

I3

G2

GPU or FPGAenabled

Memoryoptimized

X1

P2

F1

R4

R3

C5

I2D2

Resource Utilization

For given performance, how efficiently are resources being used

Something at 100% utilization can’t accept any more work

Low utilization can indicate more resource is being purchased than needed

Example: Web Application MediaWiki installed on Apache with 140 pages of content Load increased in intervals over time

Example: Web Application Memory stats

Example: Web Application Disk stats

Example: Web Application Network stats

Example: Web Application CPU stats

Give back instances as easily as you can acquire new ones Find an ideal instance type and workload combination EC2 Instance Pages provide “Use Case” Guidance With EBS, storage and instance size don’t need to be coupled

Instance Selection = Performance Tuning

“Launching new instances and running tests in parallel is easy…[when choosing an instance] there is no substitute for measuring the performance of your full application.”

- EC2 Documentation

How not to choose an EC2 instance

Brute Force Testing Ignoring Metrics Favoring old generation instances Guessing based on what you already have

Instance sizing

c4.8xlarge 2 - c4.4xlarge

≈

4 - c4.2xlarge

≈

8 - c4.xlarge

≈

Choosing the right size

Understand your unit of work Web request Database / Table Batch Process

What is that unit’s requirements? CPU threads Memory Constraints Disk & Network

What are it’s availability requirements?

Utilization & Auto Scaling Granularity

Utilization & Auto Scaling Granularity

Utilization & Auto Scaling Granularity

General Purpose Instances

Review: M4 Instances General Purpose Instance Family Balance of Compute, Memory, and Network Resources 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon® E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) processors or

2.4 GHz Intel Xeon® E5-2676 v3 (Haswell) processors

Model vCPU Memory (GiB)

Storage EBS Bandwidth (Mbps)

m4.large 2 8 EBS Only 450m4.xlarge 4 16 EBS Only 750m4.2xlarge 8 32 EBS Only 1,000

m4.4xlarge 16 64 EBS Only 2,000m4.10xlarge 40 160 EBS Only 4,000m4.16xlarge 64 256 EBS Only 10,000

Databases, Data Processing, Caching, SAP, SharePoint, and other enterprise applications.

Review: T2 Instances Lowest cost EC2 instance at $0.0065 per hour Burstable performance Fixed allocation enforced with CPU credits

Model vCPU Baseline CPU Credits / Hour

Memory (GiB)

Storage

t2.nano 1 5% 3 .5 EBS Onlyt2.micro 1 10% 6 1 EBS Onlyt2.small 1 20% 12 2 EBS Only

t2.medium 2 40%** 24 4 EBS Onlyt2.large 2 60%** 36 8 EBS Onlyt2.xlarge 4 90%** 54 16 EBS Onlyt2.2xlarge 8 135%** 81 32 EBS Only

General Purpose, Web Serving, Developer Environments, Small Databases

How Credits Work

A CPU credit provides the performance of a full CPU core for one minute

An instance earns CPU credits at a steady rate An instance consumes credits when active Credits expire (leak) after 24 hours

Baseline rate

Credit balance

Burstrate

Tip: Monitor CPU credit balance

Compute Optimized Instances

Review: C4 Instances – “Compute” Custom Intel E5-2666 v3 at 2.9 GHz Turbo to 3.5 Ghz P-state and C-state controls

Model vCPU Memory (GiB) EBS (Mbps)c4.large 2 3.75 500c4.xlarge 4 7.5 750c4.2xlarge 8 15 1,000c4.4xlarge 16 30 2,000c4.8xlarge 36 60 4,000

Batch & HPC workloads, Game Servers, Ad Serving, & High Traffic Web Servers

C5 Instance Preview

• Next Generation “Skylake” Intel® Xeon® Processor family

• AVX 512 Instruction Set• Up to 72 vCPUs in a single instance• 144 GB of RAM

• Coming early 2017

Memory Optimized Instances

Review: R4 Instances – “RAM” Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) Processors @ 2.3 Ghz DDR4 Memory

Model vCPU Memory (GiB) Network Performance

r4.large 2 15.25 Up to 10 Gigabitr4.xlarge 4 30.5 Up to 10 Gigabitr4.2xlarge 8 61 Up to 10 Gigabitr4.4xlarge 16 122 Up to 10 Gigabitr4.8xlarge 32 244 10 Gigabitr4.16xlarge 64 488 20 Gigabit

In-memory databases, big data processing, HPC workloads

Review: X1 Instances

Largest memory instance with 2 TB of DRAM Quad socket, Intel E7 processors with 128 vCPUs

Model vCPU Memory (GiB) Local Storage Networkx1.16xlarge 64 976 1x 1920GB SSD 10Gbpsx1.32xlarge 128 1952 2x 1920GB SSD 20Gbps

In-memory databases, big data processing, HPC workloads

Storage Optimized Instances

Review: D2 Instances – “Dense Storage” Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 (Haswell) @ 2.4 GHz 3.5 GBps read and 3.1 GBps write throughput w/ 2 MiB block size

Model vCPU Memory (GiB)

Storage Read Throughput(2 MiB Block size)

d2.xlarge 4 30.5 3 x 2 TB 438 MB/sd2.2xlarge 8 61 6 x 2 TB 875 MB/sd2.4xlarge 16 122 12 x 2 TB 1,750 MB/sd2.8xlarge 36 244 24 x 2 TB 3,500 MB/s

MapReduce & Hadoop, Distributed File systems, Log and Data Processing

Review: I2 Instances – “IOPS” 16 vCPU: 3.2 TB SSD; 32 vCPU: 6.4 TB SSD 365K random read IOPS for 32 vCPU instance

Model vCPU Memory (GiB)

Storage Read IOPS Write IOPS

i2.xlarge 4 30.5 1 x 800 SSD 35,000 35,000i2.2xlarge 8 61 2 x 800 SSD 75,000 75,000i2.4xlarge 16 122 4 x 800 SSD 175,000 155,000i2.8xlarge 32 244 8 x 800 SSD 365,000 315,000

NoSQL Databases, Clustered Databases, Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)

Coming Soon: I3 Instance

• Up to 64vCPUs• Intel® Xeon® E5-2686 v4 “Broadwell” @ 2.3 GHz

• 488 GB of Memory• 15.2 TB of NVMe Based SSD’s

• 3.3 Million Random IOPS @ 4KB• 16GB/s sequential throughput

• Early 2017

EBS Performance

Instance Size Matters Match your volume size and

type to your instance Use EBS Optimization if EBS

performance is important

Accelerated Instances

Review: G2 Instances – “GPU”

• Up to 4 NVIDIA GRID K520 GPUs in a single instance• Each with 1,536 CUDA cores and 4GB of video memory

• High-performance platform for graphics applications using DirectX or OpenGL

G2

Instance Size

GPUs vCPUs Memory (GiB)

SSD Storage

g2.2xlarge 1 8 15 1 x 60GBg2.8xlarge 4 32 60 2 x 120GB

Video creation services, 3D visualizations, streaming graphics, server-side graphics workloads

Review: P2 GPU Instances – “Parallel”• Up to 16 K80 GPUs in a single instance• Supports CUDA 7.5 and above, OpenCL 1.2, and the

GPU Compute APIs• Including peer-to-peer PCIe GPU interconnect

P2

Model GPUs GPU Peer to Peer

vCPUs Memory (GiB)

GPUCores

GPUMemory

Network Bandwidth*

p2.xlarge 1 - 4 61 2,496 12 Gib Highp2.8xlarge 8 Y 32 488 19,968 96 Gib 10Gbpsp2.16xlarge 16 Y 64 732 39,936 192 Gib 20Gbps

*In a placement group

Deep learning, HPC simulations, and Batch Rendering

Review: F1 Instances – “FPGA”

• Up to 8 Xilinx Virtex UltraScale Plus VU9p FPGAs in a single instance with four high-speed DDR-4 per FPGA

• Largest size includes high performance FPGA interconnects via PCIe Gen3 (FPGA Direct), and bidirectional ring (FPGA Link)

• Designed for hardware-accelerated applications including financial computing, genomics, accelerated search, and image processing

F1

Instance Size FPGAs FPGA Link

FPGA Direct

vCPUs Memory (GiB)

NVMe Instance Storage

Network Bandwidth*

f1.2xlarge 1 - 8 122 1 x 480 5 Gbpsf1.16xlarge 8 Y Y 64 976 4 x 960 30 Gbps

*In a placement group

Next steps

Visit the Amazon EC2 documentation Launch an instance and try your app!

Thank you!