Design High-Performing Architectures

A small development website has low, steady CPU usage most of the time with occasional short spikes, and the team wants to minimize cost. Which EC2 instance family fits best?

• ACompute Optimized (C family), sized for sustained high CPU demand.
• BMemory Optimized (R family), sized for very large memory footprints.
• CBurstable (T family), offering low baseline CPU with the ability to burst.
• DA large fixed instance running at full capacity to avoid throttling.

Burstable (T family) instances offer a low, cost-effective baseline and accumulate credits to burst during short spikes — ideal for low, spiky workloads. Compute and memory families overprovision here, and a large fixed instance is wasteful.

An in-memory analytics engine must hold very large datasets entirely in RAM for fast processing. Which EC2 instance family fits best?

• AMemory Optimized (R family), designed for large in-memory datasets.
• BCompute Optimized (C family), designed for CPU-bound processing.
• CBurstable (T family), designed for low-baseline intermittent workloads.
• DStorage Optimized (I family), designed for high local disk throughput.

Memory Optimized (R family) instances provide a high ratio of memory to compute for large in-memory datasets. Compute-optimized targets CPU, burstable targets low intermittent load, and storage-optimized targets disk throughput.