Instance types names are composed of 4 components
- Instance family: The primary purpose of the instance.
- Generation: Version number, higher is newer, faster and usually cheaper for the same performance
- Additional capabilities: Information about Additional hardware capabilities. Like CPU brand, networking optimization, ...
- Service related prefix/suffix: The service owning the instance (e.g. rds, search, cache...)
| Family | Letter | What It's Optimized For | Common Use Cases |
|---|
| General Purpose | T (Burstable) | Low baseline CPU with "burst" capability. | Dev/test servers, blogs, small web apps. |
| General Purpose | M (Main / Balanced) | A balanced mix of CPU, Memory, and Network. | Most applications, web servers, microservices. |
| Compute Optimized | C (Compute) | High CPU power relative to memory (RAM). | Batch processing, media transcoding, game servers. |
| Memory Optimized | R (RAM) | A large amount of Memory relative to CPU. | Databases (RDS), in-memory caches (ElastiCache). |
| Storage Optimized | I / D (I/O, Dense) | Extremely high-speed local disk I/O. | NoSQL databases, search engines (Elasticsearch). |
| Accelerated Computing | G / P (Graphics / Parallel) | Hardware accelerators (GPUs). | AI/Machine Learning, 3D rendering. |
| Capability Letter | Meaning (Processor or Feature) |
|---|
g | Graviton (AWS's custom ARM processors) |
a | AMD processors |
i | Intel processors (often omitted if default) |
d | Local NVMe Storage (fast "instance store" drives) |
n | Network Optimized (higher network bandwidth) |
z | High Frequency (very fast single-core CPU) |