Ec2

AWS EC2 Compute Guide 2025: Instance Types and Best Practices

What’s New in 2025

Key Updates and Changes

• 7th Generation Intel Instances: M7i, C7i, and R7i families with Sapphire Rapids processors
• 15% Better Performance: Custom Intel processors exclusive to AWS
• Graviton3 Dominance: Up to 40% better price-performance than Intel counterparts
• Enhanced Networking: Up to 200 Gbps network performance on select instances
• Intel Advanced Features: AMX for ML workloads, QAT, IAA, and DSA accelerators

Instance Family Updates

• Deprecated: M3, C3 instances - migrate to M7i, C7i
• New Compute: C7i with Intel AMX for ML inference
• Memory Optimized: R7i supports up to 24TB memory
• Storage Optimized: I4i with up to 30TB NVMe SSD
• ML/AI Focus: P5 instances with H100 GPUs, Trn1 with Trainium chips

Major AWS Announcements

• EC2 Capacity Blocks: Reserve GPU capacity for ML training
• Spot Instance Integration: Better integration with EKS and ECS
• Windows Server 2025: Full support with optimized AMIs

Understanding what AWS/EC2 provides for provisioning on-demand computing is essential for all DevOps. In 2025, choosing the right instance type can reduce costs by 40% or more.

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Cloud DevOps 2025: Packer, Ansible, SSH and AWS/EC2

What’s New in 2025

Key Updates and Changes

• New EC2 Instance Types: M7i, C7i, and R7i families now available with up to 15% better price-performance
• Packer Updates: Version 1.11 with predictable plugin loading and HCP integration
• Ansible Best Practices: Enhanced aws_ec2 plugin with improved security and performance features
• EBS Volume Evolution: GP3 volumes now standard, offering 20% cost savings over GP2
• HashiCorp Updates: Terraform AWS Provider 6.0 with multi-region support
• Security Enhancements: AWS Verified Access for SSH/RDP, enhanced IAM with ECR Policy v2

Deprecated Features and Migration Notes

• GP2 to GP3 Migration: GP2 volumes should be migrated to GP3 for cost savings
• EC2 Dynamic Inventory: Old ec2.py script deprecated in favor of aws_ec2 plugin
• Instance Types: Consider upgrading from M6i to M7i instances for better performance
• Packer AWS Builder: Continue using amazon-ebs builder with updated authentication methods

Cloud DevOps: Using Packer, Ansible/SSH and AWS command line tools to create and DBA manage EC2 Cassandra instances in AWS.

This article is useful for developers and DevOps/DBA staff who want to create AWS AMI images and manage those EC2 instances with Ansible. Although this article is part of a series about setting up the Cassandra Database images and doing DevOps/DBA with Cassandra clusters, the topics we cover apply to AWS DevOps in general - even if you don’t use Cassandra at all.

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Cloud DevOps: Packer, Ansible, SSH and AWS/EC2

Cloud DevOps: Using Packer, Ansible/SSH and AWS command line tools to create and DBA manage EC2 Cassandra instances in AWS.

This article is useful for developers and DevOps/DBA staff who want to create AWS AMI images and manage those EC2 instances with Ansible. Although this article is part of a series about setting up the Cassandra Database images and doing DevOps/DBA with Cassandra clusters, the topics we cover apply to AWS DevOps in general - even if you don’t use Cassandra at all.

Continue reading

EC2 Compute

Understanding what AWS/EC2 provides for provisioning on-demand computing is essential for all DevOps.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Amazon EC2 is AWS primary web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

EC2 Compute

Compute is computational power needed for your use case. Amazon EC2 allows add compute resources through its Web Service API. EC2 allows you to launch instances. An instance is a server and you can install whatever software you need for your service or web application: NGINX, Apache httpd, Cassandra, Kafka, etc. When you launch a virtual server, an instance in EC2 speak, you can use it as you like just like you would a server in your datacenter. You pay for the compute power that you use. There are different instance types with various ranges of CPU, RAM, IO, and networking power. You pay for compute resources by the hour. You can use more instances and you can reserve instances for longer periods of time for a price break.

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