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.