All You Need to Know About Amazon Web Services ECU vs. vCPU

 If you've deployed an application or service to the Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud, you've almost certainly used an EC2 instance. One of the decisions you had to make before starting a new instance was the instance type to utilise. Choosing an EC2 instance type can be challenging. Within each instance family, AWS splits its instance types into instance families, which range from micro to 32xlarge.

The types of instances available vary by area. However, a combination of the following is the primary factor that separates each instance type:

Memory Storage capacity and type of storage Network connectivity and performance Compute power or CPU

In this post, we will look at computational power. We'll go over the challenges of measuring and comparing compute power in a virtual environment, as well as the different ways AWS has tried to make itThe issue is that comparing instance types based on their specifications might be challenging. When you use a virtual machine, you get a share of the host system's processing power. Because an allotment of processing power is not the same as an actual processor, AWS needed a way to assess this given capacity and compare different instance types. When EC2 was first published, compute power was presented as an ECU value (or an EC2 Compute Unit).

What is an EC2 Compute Unit, and how does it work?

Amazon needed a way to guarantee constant CPU capacity for its instances, regardless of the underlying hardware, thus they came up with the notion for an ECU. A single EC2 compute unit is equivalent to a 2007 Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processor. easier for customers to make informed decisions about instance kinds.

The Obstacle The Virtual Environment is the source of this information.

You are renting space in one of AWS' data centres when you establish an EC2 instance. EC2 instances are virtual machines that are housed on powerful servers that you share with other AWS users. One of the benefits of the virtual machine paradigm is that you, as a customer, are not required to understand the underlying server architecture specifications.

From 2006 to 2014, the AWS ECU was the standard measurement of processing power on all EC2 instances. This largely resolves the issues with comparing different instance types, allowing AWS to place instances on newer infrastructure while maintaining the same capacity as instances on older hardware.

ECU measurement was largely equal at the time, according to benchmarking. They did, however, see a performance improvement that was proportional to the number of ECUs. This improvement could be related to a reduction in the number of instances hosted concurrently on a host server, according to one idea. One of these benchmark studies' findings can be seen here.

Is it better to use an ECU or a virtual CPU?

One of AWS's challenges was informing new and existing customers about the ECU metric, which was not always an easy concept for them to grasp. Because virtual machines are generally measured in virtual CPUs (or vCPUs), AWS replaced the ECU metric with the more traditional vCPU metric in 2014.

One of the benefits of using the ECU to estimate processing capacity was that it established a standard approach to measuring processing performance across all instance types. However, because it is not a standardised phrase, it is prone to misunderstanding.

Factors that can affect the performance of your virtual CPUs

The most important factor determining an instance's processing power is how the vCPUs on the instance type are set. Let's see how the compute-optimized C4 instance types stack up against the general-purpose M4 instance types. You'll see that the processor specifications aren't identical.

2.9 GHz Intel Xeon E5–2666 v3 Processor — Intel AVX, Intel AVX2, Intel Turbo — EBS-optimized — Enhanced Networking — C4 Compute-Optimized

M4 General-Purpose — Intel Xeon Platinum Processor — Intel AVX, Intel AVX2, Intel Turbo — EBS-optimized — Enhanced Networking — Up to 3.1 GHz Intel Xeon Platinum Processor — Intel AVX, Intel AVX2, Intel Turbo — EBS-optimized

Another factor that influences processing performance is the underlying hardware. Operating the following command on a Linux instance will provide the exact CPU that is running on the host computer.

$ grep "model name" in /proc/cpuinfo

You might receive something like this if you execute this command on two different machines:

i-5560…. Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5–2650 0 @ 2.00GHz or i-bb23.... model name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5–2650 0 @ 2.00GHz or i-bb23.... Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5506 @ 2.13GHz product name

If performance is critical, one method uses a command similar to this when starting a new machine, rejecting instances generated on older hardware.

Summary

It's crucial to understand the relevance of the available measurements for your instance type, whether it's ECUs or vCPUs, and how they compare to physical processor types. If performance is crucial, review the detailed requirements for each instance type to verify you're getting the most possible processing power for your application.