AWS is constantly updating their instance offerings, providing you with the latest and greatest technologies in their quest to provide better price performance. While updating your applications to launch on the latest instance types may require a little testing – the benefit can be much larger than increased performance.
Taking a look at the history of the general-purpose (M) instance family. With the recent addition of M5 instances, AWS continues their trait of upgrades to the ever-popular instance type going back all the way to M1 (2006), M2 (2009), M3(2012), M4(2015), and most recently the M5(2017).
It can be tempting to launch workloads on an instance type and stick with it – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it as the old adage goes. However taking a look at the pricing below, it becomes apparent that sticking with the latest generation is not only the cheapest, but best performing option available.
| Instance Name | RAM | vCPUs | Network Performance | Enhanced Networking | Linux On Demand cost Hourly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| m1.xlarge | 15.0 GiB | 4 | High | No | $0.350 |
| m2.xlarge | 17.1 GiB | 2 | Moderate | No | $0.245 |
| m3.xlarge | 15.0 GiB | 4 | High | No | $0.266 |
| m4.xlarge | 16.0 GiB | 4 | High | Yes | $0.200 |
| m5.xlarge | 16.0 GiB | 4 | High | Yes | $0.192 |
With a hardware refresh with every generation, the latest M5’s sport an Intel Xeon Platinum processor at 2.5ghz supporting AVX2 going all the way up to m5.24xl with 96 vCPUs and 384 GiB of memory
What does your EC2 Fleet consist of today? It may be time to take a look at what you have deployed.
Don’t wait to buy Reserved Instances just because you’re upgrading your instance types – Save even more during the transition time. Contact us to find out how.
