Find an Amazon EC2 instance type - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Find an instance type using the consoleDescribe an instance type using the AWS CLIFind an instance type using the AWS CLI

Find an Amazon EC2 instance type

Before you can launch an instance, you must select an instance type to use. The instance type that you choose might depend on the resources that your workload requires, such as compute, memory, or storage resources. It can be beneficial to identify several instance types that might suit your workload and evaluate their performance in a test environment. There is no substitute for measuring the performance of your application under load.

You can get suggestions and guidance for EC2 instance types using the EC2 instance type finder. For more information, see Get recommendations from EC2 instance type finder.

If you already have running EC2 instances, you can use AWS Compute Optimizer to get recommendations about the instance types that you should use to improve performance, save money, or both. For more information, see Get EC2 instance recommendations from Compute Optimizer.

Find an instance type using the console

You can find an instance type that meets your needs using the Amazon EC2 console.

To find an instance type using the console

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. From the navigation bar, select the Region in which to launch your instances. You can select any Region that's available to you, regardless of your location.

  3. In the navigation pane, choose Instance Types.

  4. (Optional) Choose the preferences (gear) icon to select which instance type attributes to display, such as On-Demand Linux pricing, and then choose Confirm. Alternatively, select the name of an instance type to open its details page and view all attributes available through the console. The console does not display all the attributes available through the API or the command line.

  5. Use the instance type attributes to filter the list of displayed instance types to only the instance types that meet your needs. For example, you can filter on the following attributes:

    • Availability zones – The name of the Availability Zone, Local Zone, or Wavelength Zone. For more information, see Regions and Zones.

    • vCPUs or Cores – The number of vCPUs or cores.

    • Memory (GiB) – The memory size, in GiB.

    • Network performance – The network performance, in Gigabits.

    • Local instance storage – Indicates whether the instance type has local instance storage (true | false).

  6. (Optional) To see a side-by-side comparison, select the checkbox for multiple instance types. The comparison is displayed at the bottom of the screen.

  7. (Optional) To save the list of instance types to a comma-separated values (.csv) file for further review, choose Actions, Download list CSV. The file includes all instance types that match the filters you set.

  8. (Optional) To launch instances using an instance type that meet your needs, select the checkbox for the instance type and choose Actions, Launch instance. For more information, see Launch an Amazon EC2 instance using the launch instance wizard in the Amazon EC2 console.

Describe an instance type using the AWS CLI

You can use the describe-instance-types command to describe a specific instance type.

To fully describe an instance type

The following command displays all available details for the specified instance type. The output is lengthy, so it is omitted here.

aws ec2 describe-instance-types \
    --instance-types t2.micro \
    --region us-east-2
The describe an instance type and filter the output

The following command displays the networking details for the specified instance type.

aws ec2 describe-instance-types \
    --instance-types t2.micro \
    --region us-east-2 \
    --query "InstanceTypes[].NetworkInfo"

The following is example output.

[
    {
        "NetworkPerformance": "Low to Moderate",
        "MaximumNetworkInterfaces": 2,
        "MaximumNetworkCards": 1,
        "DefaultNetworkCardIndex": 0,
        "NetworkCards": [
            {
                "NetworkCardIndex": 0,
                "NetworkPerformance": "Low to Moderate",
                "MaximumNetworkInterfaces": 2,
                "BaselineBandwidthInGbps": 0.064,
                "PeakBandwidthInGbps": 1.024
            }
        ],
        "Ipv4AddressesPerInterface": 2,
        "Ipv6AddressesPerInterface": 2,
        "Ipv6Supported": true,
        "EnaSupport": "unsupported",
        "EfaSupported": false,
        "EncryptionInTransitSupported": false,
        "EnaSrdSupported": false
    }
]

The following command displays the available memory for the specified instance type.

aws ec2 describe-instance-types \
    --instance-types t2.micro \
    --region us-east-2 \
    --query "InstanceTypes[].MemoryInfo"

The following is example output.

[
    {
        "SizeInMiB": 1024
    }
]

Find an instance type using the AWS CLI

You can use the describe-instance-types and describe-instance-type-offerings commands to find the instance types that meet your needs.

Example 1: Find an instance type by Availability Zone

The following example displays only the instance types offered in the specified Availability Zone.

aws ec2 describe-instance-type-offerings --location-type "availability-zone" \
    --filters "Name=location,Values=us-east-2a" \
    --region us-east-2 \
    --query "InstanceTypeOfferings[*].[InstanceType]" --output text | sort

The output is a list of instance types, sorted alphabetically. The following is the start of the output only.

a1.2xlarge
a1.4xlarge
a1.large
a1.medium
a1.metal
a1.xlarge
c4.2xlarge
   ...

Example 2: Find an instance type by available memory size

The following example displays only current generation instance types with 64 GiB (65536 MiB) of memory.

aws ec2 describe-instance-types \
    --filters "Name=current-generation,Values=true" "Name=memory-info.size-in-mib,Values=65536" \
    --region us-east-2 \
    --query "InstanceTypes[*].[InstanceType]" --output text | sort

The output is a list of instance types, sorted alphabetically. The following is the start of the output only.

c5a.8xlarge
c5ad.8xlarge
c6a.8xlarge
c6g.8xlarge
c6gd.8xlarge
c6gn.8xlarge
c6i.8xlarge
c6id.8xlarge
c6in.8xlarge
   ...

Example 3: Find an instance type by available instance storage

The following example displays the total size of instance storage for all R7 instances with instance store volumes.

aws ec2 describe-instance-types \
    --filters "Name=instance-type,Values=r7*" "Name=instance-storage-supported,Values=true" \
    --region us-east-2 \
    --query "InstanceTypes[].[InstanceType, InstanceStorageInfo.TotalSizeInGB]" \
    --output table

The following is example output.

---------------------------
|  DescribeInstanceTypes  |
+----------------+--------+
|  r7gd.xlarge   |  237   |
|  r7gd.8xlarge  |  1900  |
|  r7gd.16xlarge |  3800  |
|  r7gd.medium   |  59    |
|  r7gd.4xlarge  |  950   |
|  r7gd.2xlarge  |  474   |
|  r7gd.metal    |  3800  |
|  r7gd.large    |  118   |
|  r7gd.12xlarge |  2850  |
+----------------+--------+

Example 4: Find an instance type that supports hibernation

The following example displays the instance types that support hibernation.

aws ec2 describe-instance-types \
    --filters "Name=hibernation-supported,Values=true" \
    --region us-east-2 \
    --query "InstanceTypes[*].[InstanceType]" \
    --output text | sort

The output is a list of instance types, sorted alphabetically. The following is the start of the output only.

c4.2xlarge
c4.4xlarge
c4.8xlarge
c4.large
c4.xlarge
c5.12xlarge
c5.18xlarge
c5.2xlarge
c5.4xlarge
c5.9xlarge
...