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Comment by gazby | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of good ideas in this thread, but recently I've found I can't use ec2instances.info anymore because there's no description of the instance classes (and I can't keep them all in my head anymore. c5 is obvious, but what are c5n, c5a, c5d, and c5ad? Might be troublesome in a column, but maybe a popover on the name column or something could work.

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I am glad to know I am not the only one who cannot remember what the families and letters mean! There appears to be no slow down in sight either. I created https://cloudhw.info/ out of a desire to track these values.

This isn't bad at all, thanks for the link!

Still, with 11 general-purpose types for AWS alone I'm still lacking the context I need to determine which I delve into and what to disregard.

Hey, this is good feedback and likely a quick fix. If you email me (ben@vantage.sh) I can let you know when we have this support added.

That's super cool Ben, thanks! Email incoming!

There is a method to the madness:

-d is disk (instance store)

-a is amd

-ad is both

-n is enhanced networking (ENA, or EFA on the biggest instances)

Hey thanks that is simpler than expected!

Still, apart from the obvious ones (m, c, t) there's also the myriad top-level classes that I'd have no idea about - like what is r, i, d, x, p, g etc. My brain is too puny for all that!

These are my mnemonics, pretty sure I'm not too far off though:

  r = RAM.    Instances are biased toward having more memory.
  i = I/O.    ... have fast SSDs.
  d = DISK.   ... lots of disk space.
  x = XL.     ... lots of RAM
  g = GPU.    ... have GPU hardware

...and of course now I realize this is already answered on SO. I'm keeping mine though.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/56880093

This is definitely helpful, though I think the SO question showcases fairly well why someone would want the summary on the web page: Several are ambiguous and if you're not regularly exploring new instance types you're going to forget this or fall behind in your awareness of new types.

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