Burstable performance instances

These low-to-moderate CPU utilization workloads lead to wastage of CPU cycles and, as a result, you pay for more than you use. To overcome this, you can leverage the low-cost burstable general purpose instances, which are the T instances.

The T instance family provides a baseline CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline at any time for as long as required. The baseline CPU is defined to meet the needs of the majority of general purpose workloads, including large-scale micro-services, web servers, small and medium databases, data logging, code repositories, virtual desktops, development and test environments, and business-critical applications. The T instances offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources, and provide you with the most cost-effective way to run a broad spectrum of general purpose applications that have a low-to-moderate CPU usage. They can save you up to 15% in costs when compared to M instances, and can lead to even more cost savings with smaller, more economical instance sizes, offering as low as 2 vCPUs and 0.5 GiB of memory. The smaller T instance sizes, such as nano, micro, small, and medium, are well suited for workloads that need a small amount of memory and do not expect high CPU usage.
EC2 burstable instance types

The EC2 burstable instances consist of T4g, T3a and T3 instance types, and the previous generation T2 instance types.

The T4g instance types are the latest generation of burstable instances. They provide the best price for performance, and provide you with the lowest cost of all the EC2 instance types. The T4g instance types are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors with extensive ecosystem support from operating systems vendors, independent software vendors, and popular AWS services and applications.

The following table summarizes the key differences between the burstable instance types.

TypeDescriptionProcessor familyLatest generation
T4g | Lowest cost EC2 instance type with up to 40% higher price/performance and 20% lower costs vs T3 | AWS Graviton2 processors with Arm Neoverse N1 cores
T3a | Lowest cost x86-based instances with 10% lower costs vs T3 instances | AMD 1st gen EPYC processors
T3 | Best peak price/performance for x86 workloads with up to 30% lower price/performance vs previous generation T2 instances | Intel Xeon Scalable (Skylake, Cascade Lake processors)
Previous generation
T2 | Previous generation burstable instances | Intel Xeon processors

For information about instance pricing and additional specifications, see Amazon EC2 Pricing and Amazon EC2 Instance Types. For information about burstable network performance, see Amazon EC2 instance network bandwidth.

If your account is less than 12 months old, you can use a t2.micro instance for free (or a t3.micro instance in Regions where t2.micro is unavailable) within certain usage limits. For more information, see AWS Free Tier.