Amazon recently introduced the next generation of their compute-optimized instances: EC2 C5 instances. Compute instances are well suited to compute-heavy workloads such as batch processing, distributed analytics, high-performance computing etc.

If you are considering whether you should migrate your workload from the previous generation instance families to C5, then the next couple of sections should help with the decision.

What’s new in C5?

The C5 instances are powered by the Skylake processor from Intel. The Skylake processor has several improvements over the Haswell processor which is used in the C4 instance family.

Amazon has also introduced a new instance type for the C5 instance family, c5.18xlarge, which provides 72 vCPUs and 144 GB of memory. There is no comparable instance type in any of the previous instance families.

Comparing C4 and C5 instances

Let’s take a closer look at the differences between the two instance families.

Why should you care about where to host your blog?

Have you ever had to face any of these issues with your site?

• Reliability: Frequent downtime leading to bad user experience. There could be many reasons for this such as hardware failures, security issues or application errors.

• Scalability & Flexibility: Your site went viral but it couldn’t handle the sudden increase in traffic. One of the major reasons for this is that many hosting providers limit the bandwidth and storage you can use.

• Pricing: Most hosting providers charge a fixed fee every month. If you end up not using all the resources, you overpay for the service.

• Developer friendly: There is no easy and programmatic way to interact with the underlying infrastructure. You have to manually update your site every time you make changes.

There is good news! Amazon provides a service called Simple Storage Service also known as “S3” that solves a lot of the problems mentioned above.

Amazon S3 is a simple key, value store which can store as many files as you want. These objects are stored in buckets.