General purpose instances provide a balance of compute, memory and networking resources, and can be used for many workloads. These instances are good for applications such as web servers, code repositories, and small-to-medium databases.

Compute optimized instances are ideal for compute bound applications that benefit from high-performance processors. Some examples of workloads for compute instances are batch processing, media transcoding, and dedicated game servers.

Memory optimized instances are designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory. For example, these instances are good for in-memory databases, data analytics, and enterprise applications.

Accelerated computing instances use hardware accelerators, or co-processors, to perform functions more efficiently. For example, they can perform floating point number calculations, graphics processing, or data pattern matching.

Storage optimized instances deliver millions of low-latency, random I/O operations per second to applications. They’re designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to very large data sets on local storage. For example, they’re good for high-throughput databases, data processing, and data streaming.

High-performance computing (HPC) instances offer the best price performance for running HPC workloads at scale. HPC instances are ideal for applications that benefit from high-performance processors such as complex simulations, deep learning, and visual effects rendering.