Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides a virtual server for running applications, which can scale up or down as your computing requirements change. EC2 instance types are grouped based on target application profiles and include the following: general purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, storage-optimized (high I/O), dense storage, GPU compute, and graphics intensive. Today, there are more than 175 instance types available for a variety of virtual workloads and business needs. In addition to these broad categories, capability choices can be made based on the type of processor (for example, Intel, AMD, or AWS), memory footprint, networking, size, etc. If necessary, each EC2 instance can be associated with a specific choice of Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic Graphics, and Amazon Elastic Inference.

The breadth of the options available is shown in the following diagram:

Figure 2 – Overview of Amazon EC2 instance types

Telecom providers require several performance accelerating features to be supported in their computing infrastructure and this paper will show how AWS supports those features. First, an overview of the different performance and optimization options available in AWS for virtualized environments is provided. Next, a brief history of EC2 performance is given, followed by how that evolution has affected the different instance types. Finally, guidance is provided on what you can expect to achieve with the different instance families in regard to performance.