PERF 1. How do you select the appropriate instance type for your system?
Amazon EC2 offers a wide selection of instance types optimized to fit different use cases. Instance types are composed of varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity and give you the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for your applications. Each instance type includes one or more instance sizes, allowing you to scale your resources to the requirements of your target workload. AWS supports instance-less architectures, such as AWS Lambda, that can radically change the performance efficiency of a workload.
Best practices:
 Policy/Reference Architecture Select instance type and size based on predicted resource needs with internal governance standards.
 Cost/Budget Select instance type and size based on predicted resource needs with internal cost controls.

 Benchmarking Load test a known workload on AWS and use that to estimate the best selection – testing a known performance benchmark vs. a known workload.
 Guidance from AWS or from a member of the AWS Partner Network (APN) Make your selections based on best practice advice.
 Load Test Deploy the latest version of your system on AWS using different instance types and sizes, use monitoring to capture performance metrics, and then make a selection based on a calculation of performance/cost.