Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook

EC2 instance types

EC2 instances are the most expensive part of a company's AWS bill. So, selecting the right instance type is the key through which you can optimize your bill. The following section is a quick overview of the different instance types. Instance types, both in the cloud and on premises, are defined by four factors:

• Number of cores
• Memory
• Storage (size and type)
• Network performance

To see a quick illustration of how these factors affect each other, visit http://youtube.com/infoobjects.

In the EC2 world, these factors have been modified slightly to vCPU. vCPU is a virtualized unit of:

• Memory  
• Storage (size and type)
• Network performance

Instance type families are defined by the ratio of these factors, especially vCPU to memory. ...