Amazon EC2 | General Purpose Instances Flashcards
Do High I/O instances support TRIM?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
The TRIM command allows the operating system to inform SSDs which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internally. In the absence of TRIM, future write operations to the involved blocks can slow down significantly. I3 instances support TRIM.
What are the key use cases for Amazon EC2 M5 Instances?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
M5 instances offer a good choice for running development and test environments, web, mobile and gaming applications, analytics applications, and business critical applications including ERP, HR, CRM, and collaboration apps. Customers who are interested in running their data intensive workloads (e.g. HPC, or SOLR clusters) on instances with a higher memory footprint will also find M5 to be a good fit. Workloads that heavily use single and double precision floating point operations and vector processing such as video processing workloads and need higher memory can benefit substantially from the AVX-512 instructions that M5 supports.
Why should customers choose EC2 M5 Instances over EC2 M4 Instances?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
Compared with EC2 M4 Instances, the new EC2 M5 Instances deliver customers greater compute and storage performance, larger instance sizes for less cost, consistency and security. The biggest benefit of EC2 M5 Instances is based on its usage of the latest generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors (aka Skylake), which deliver up to 14% improvement in price/performance compared to M4. With AVX-512 support in M5 vs. the older AVX2 in M4, customers will gain 2x higher performance in workloads requiring floating point operations. M5 instances offer up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth and up to 10 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth to Amazon EBS. M5 instances also feature significantly higher networking and Amazon EBS performance on smaller instance sizes with EBS burst capability.
How does support for Intel AVX-512 benefit EC2 M5 Instance customers?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
Intel Advanced Vector Extension 512 (AVX-512) is a set of new CPU instructions available on the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processor family, that can accelerate performance for workloads and usages such as scientific simulations, financial analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning/deep learning, 3D modeling and analysis, image and video processing, cryptography and data compression, among others. Intel AVX-512 offers exceptional processing of encryption algorithms, helping to reduce the performance overhead for cryptography, which means EC2 M5 customers can deploy more secure data and services into distributed environments without compromising performance
What are the various storage options available to M5 customers?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
M5 instances leverage EBS volumes for storage. There is currently no local storage option for M5 instances.
Which network interface is supported on M5 instances?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
M5 instances support only ENA based Enhanced Networking. M5 instances will not support netback. With ENA, M5 instances can deliver up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth between instances when launched within a Placement Group.
Which operating systems/AMIs are supported on M5 Instances?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
EBS backed HVM AMIs with support for ENA networking and booting from NVMe-based storage can be used with M5 instances. The following AMIs are supported on M5:
Amazon Linux 2014.03 or newer
Ubuntu 14.04 or newer
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 or newer
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 or newer
CentOS 7 or newer
Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows Server 2016
FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE
What are the storage options available to M5 customers?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
M5 instances use EBS volumes for storage, are EBS-optimized by default, and offer up to 10 Gbps throughput to both encrypted and unencrypted EBS volumes. M5 instances access EBS volumes via PCI attached NVM Express (NVMe) interfaces. NVMe is an efficient and scalable storage interface commonly used for flash based SSDs such as local NVMe storage provided with I3 instances. Though the NVMe interface may provide lower latency compared to Xen paravirtualized block devices, when used to access EBS volumes the volume type, size, and provisioned IOPS (if applicable) will determine the overall latency and throughput characteristics of the volume. When NVMe is used to provide EBS volumes, they are attached and detached by PCI hotplug.
How many EBS volumes can be attached to M5 instances?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
M5 instances support a maximum for 27 EBS volumes for all Operating systems. The limit is shared with ENI attachments which can be found here http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-eni.html. For example: since every instance has at least 1 ENI, if you have 3 additional ENI attachments on the m4.2xlarge, you can attach 24 EBS volumes to that instance.
What is the underlying hypervisor on M5 instances?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
M5 instances use a new lightweight Nitro Hypervisor that is based on core KVM technology.
Why does the total memory reported by Linux not match the advertised memory of the M5 instance type?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
In M5, portions of the total memory for an instance are reserved from use by the operating system including areas used by the virtual BIOS for things like ACPI tables and for devices like the virtual video RAM.
How are Burstable Performance Instances different?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
Amazon EC2 allows you to choose between Fixed Performance Instances (e.g. C, M and R instance families) and Burstable Performance Instances (e.g. T2). Burstable Performance Instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline.
T2 instances’ baseline performance and ability to burst are governed by CPU Credits. Each T2 instance receives CPU Credits continuously, the rate of which depends on the instance size. T2 instances accrue CPU Credits when they are idle, and consume CPU credits when they are active. A CPU Credit provides the performance of a full CPU core for one minute.
Model
vCPUs
CPU Credits / hour
Maximum CPU Credit Balance
Baseline CPU Performance
t2. nano 1 3 72 5% of a core
t2. micro
1
6
144
10% of a core
t2.small
1
12
288
20% of a core
t2.medium
2
24
576
40% of a core*
t2. large 2 36 864 60% of a core**
t2. xlarge
4
54
1,296
90% of a core***
t2.2xlarge
8
81
1,944
135% of a core****
* For the t2.medium, single threaded applications can use 40% of 1 core, or if needed, multithreaded applications can use 20% each of 2 cores.
**For the t2.large, single threaded applications can use 60% of 1 core, or if needed, multithreaded applications can use 30% each of 2 cores.
*** For the t2.xlarge, single threaded applications can use 90% of 1 core, or if needed, multithreaded applications can use 45% each of 2 cores or 22.5% of all 4 cores.
**** For the t2.large, single threaded applications can use all of 1 core, or if needed, multithreaded applications can use 67.5% each of 2 cores or 16.875% of all 8 cores.
How do I choose the right Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for my T2 instances?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
You will want to verify that the minimum memory requirements of your operating system and applications are within the memory allocated for each T2 instance size (e.g. 512 MiB for t2.nano). Operating systems with Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) that consume significant memory and CPU, for example Microsoft Windows, might need a t2.micro or larger instance size for many use cases. You can find AMIs suitable for the t2.nano instance types on AWS Marketplace. Windows customers who do not need the GUI can use the Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Core AMI.
When should I choose a Burstable Performance Instance, such as T2?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
T2 instances provide a cost-effective platform for a broad range of general purpose production workloads. T2 Unlimited instances can sustain high CPU performance for as long as required. If your workloads consistently require CPU usage much higher than the baseline, consider a dedicated CPU instance family such as the M or C.
How can I see the CPU Credit balance for each T2 instance?
General Purpose Instances
Amazon EC2 | Compute
You can see the CPU Credit balance for each T2 instance in EC2 per-Instance metrics in Amazon CloudWatch. T2 instances have four metrics, CPUCreditUsage, CPUCreditBalance, CPUSurplusCreditBalance and CPUSurplusCreditsCharged. CPUCreditUsage indicates the amount of CPU Credits used. CPUCreditBalance indicates the balance of CPU Credits. CPUSurplusCredit Balance indicates credits used for bursting in the absence of earned credits. CPUSurplusCreditsCharged indicates credits that are charged when average usage exceeds the baseline.
