# AWS EC2 Hardware Trends: 2015-2021

DevFeed: [AWS EC2 Hardware Trends: 2015-2021](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/aws-ec2-hardware-trends-2015-2021-25073.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://databasearchitects.blogspot.com/2021/07/aws-ec2-hardware-trends-2015-2021.html>)

Author: Viktor Leis (noreply@blogger.com)

Published: 2021-07-04T14:23:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Database Architects](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/database-architects.md>)

Topics: [Amazon EC2](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/amazon-ec2.md>), [Hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/hardware.md>), [Amazon Web Services](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/aws.md>), [cpu](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cpu.md>), [intel](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/intel.md>), [Network](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/network.md>), [NVMe](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/nvme.md>), [Cloud](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cloud.md>)

Tags: [aws](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/aws.md>), [capacity](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/capacity.md>), [compute](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/compute.md>), [cost](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cost.md>), [cpu](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cpu.md>), [ec2](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ec2.md>), [hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hardware.md>), [intel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/intel.md>), [network](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/network.md>), [nvme](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/nvme.md>)

## AI overview

This article analyzes AWS EC2 hardware trends from 2015 to 2021 using hardware resources normalized by instance price. It finds that compute and DRAM costs changed little, while storage and network bandwidth saw significant improvements.

## Source excerpt

Over the past decade, AWS EC2 has introduced many new instance types with different hardware configurations and prices. This hardware zoo can make it hard to keep track of what is available. In this post we will look at how the EC2 hardware landscape changed since 2015. This will hopefully help picking the best option for a given task. In the cloud, one can trade money for hardware resources. It therefore makes sense to take an economical perspective and normalize the hardware resource by the instance price. For example, instead of looking at absolute network bandwidth, we will use network bandwidth per dollar. Such metrics also allow us to ignore virtualized slices, reducing the number of instances relevant for the analysis from hundreds to dozens. For example, c5n.9xlarge is a virtualized slice of c5n.18xlarge with half the network bandwidth and half the cost. Data Set We use historical data from https://instances.vantage.sh/ and only consider current-generation Intel machines without GPUs. All prices are for us-east-1 Linux instances. Using these constraints, in July 2021 we can pick from the following instances: namevCPUmemory [GB]network [Gbit/s]storageprice [$/h]m4.16x6425625 3.20h1.16x64256258x2TB disk3.74c5n.18x72192100 3.89d3.8x322562524x2TB disk4.00c5.24x9619225 4.08r4.16x6448825 4.26m5.24x9638425 4.61c5d.24x96192254x0.9TB NVMe4.61i3.16x64488258x1.9TB NVMe5.00m5d.24x96384254x0.9TB NVMe5.42d2.8x362441024x2TB disk5.52m5n.24x96384100 5.71r5.24x9676825 6.05d3en.12x481927524x14TB disk6.31m5dn.24x963841004x0.9TB NVMe6.52r5d.24x96768254x0.9TB NVMe6.91r5n.24x96768100 7.15r5b.24x9676825 7.15r5dn.24x967681004x0.9TB NVMe8.02i3en.24x967681008x7.5TB NVMe10.85x1e.32x1283904252x1.9TB SATA26.69 && Compute Using our six-year data set, let's first look at the cost of compute: It is quite remarkable that from 2015 to 2021, the cost of compute barely changed. During that six-year time frame, the number of server CPU cores has been growing significantly, which may imply that I