AWS has been integral to my work lately, however, choosing which EC2 instance to launch always took me a bit of time. Being a student meant I had to be careful to select the most efficient instance for the lowest price possible. Being new to the subtleties of different instance types (general vs. compute vs. memory optimized, etc) meant I had to explore and find one that suited me. Sometimes I needed more RAM, and sometimes less. Sometimes vCPU didn’t matter, but often it did. I’d always find myself on the AWS EC2 pricing page and see what was available and what I could afford. It wasn’t easy to narrow down my choices and compare across them.

So I finally went ahead and got all the EC2 data and organized it in an interactive datatable using one of my favorite R packages. It’s easy to decide which instance to choose based on:

• cost (extremely important!)
• memory
• vCPU
• instance type

I’ll add a post soon detailing how I scraped and compiled this data (using R of course!).

Btw, if you’re a student, you could apply for the free Github Student Developer Pack and get $100 worth of AWS credit. It really helped me get started.