Instance Types and Architectures

Instance Types and Architectures: "How do I select the right instance type?
Amazon EC2 instances are grouped into two families: standard and High-CPU. Standard instances have memory to CPU ratios suitable for most general purpose applications; High-CPU instances have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM) and are well suited for compute-intensive applications. When selecting instance types, you might want to use less powerful instance types for your web server instances and more powerful instance types for your database instances. Additionally, you might want to run CPU instance types for CPU-intensive data processing tasks.
For most applications, the standard instance types are appropriate. These instance types include the small instance (m1.small), large instance (m1.large), and extra large instance (m1.xlarge). High-CPU instances are well suited for compute-intensive applications such as rendering, search indexing, and computational analysis. The High-CPU instance types are the High-CPU medium instance (c1.medium) and the High-CPU extra large instance (c1.xlarge). For more information, refer to Instance Types"