Amazon EC2 Instance Selector

A CLI tool and go library which recommends instance types based on resource criteria like vcpus and memory.

Summary

There are over 800 different instance types available on EC2 which can make the process of selecting appropriate instance types difficult. Instance Selector helps you select compatible instance types for your application to run on. The command line interface can be passed resource criteria like vcpus, memory, network performance, and much more and then return the available, matching instance types.

If you are using spot instances to save on costs, it is a best practice to use multiple instances types within your auto-scaling group (ASG) to ensure your application doesn't experience downtime due to one instance type being interrupted. Instance Selector will help to find a set of instance types that your application can run on.

Instance Selector can also be consumed as a go library for direct integration into your go code.

Major Features

• Filter AWS Instance Types using declarative resource criteria like vcpus, memory, network performance, and much more!
• Aggregate filters allow for more opinionated instance selections like --base-instance-type and --flexible
• Consumable as a go library or CLI
• Interactive TUI w/ --output interactive

Installation and Configuration

Install w/ Homebrew

brew tap aws/tap
brew install ec2-instance-selector

Install w/ Curl for Linux/Mac

os=$(uname | tr 'A-Z' 'a-z')
arch=$(printf "%s" "$(uname -m | tr 'A-Z' 'a-z' | sed -E 's/x86_64|i[3-6]86/amd64/;s/aarch64|arm64/arm64/')")
curl -Lo ec2-instance-selector https://github.com/aws/amazon-ec2-instance-selector/releases/latest/download/ec2-instance-selector-$os-$arch && chmod +x ec2-instance-selector
sudo mv ec2-instance-selector /usr/local/bin/
ec2-instance-selector --version

To execute the CLI, you will need AWS credentials configured. Take a look at the AWS CLI configuration documentation for details on the various ways to configure credentials. An easy way to try out the ec2-instance-selector CLI is to populate the following environment variables with your AWS API credentials.

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="..."
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="..."

If you already have an AWS CLI profile setup, you can pass that directly into ec2-instance-selector:

$ ec2-instance-selector --profile my-aws-cli-profile --vcpus 2 --region us-east-1

You can set the AWS_REGION environment variable if you don't want to pass in --region on each run.

$ export AWS_REGION="us-east-1"

Examples

CLI

Find Instance Types with 4 GiB of memory, 2 vcpus, and runs on the x86_64 CPU architecture

$ ec2-instance-selector --memory 4 --vcpus 2 --cpu-architecture x86_64 -r us-east-1
c5.large
c5a.large
c5ad.large
c5d.large
c6a.large
c6i.large
c6id.large
c6in.large
c7a.large
c7i-flex.large
c7i.large
t2.medium
t3.medium
t3a.medium

Find instance types that support 100GB/s networking that can be purchased as spot instances

$ ec2-instance-selector --network-performance 100 --usage-class spot -r us-east-1
c5n.18xlarge
c5n.metal
c6gn.16xlarge
c6in.16xlarge
c7gn.8xlarge
dl1.24xlarge
f2.48xlarge
g4dn.metal
g5.48xlarge
g6.48xlarge
g6e.12xlarge
i3en.24xlarge
i3en.metal
i7ie.24xlarge
i7ie.48xlarge
im4gn.16xlarge
inf1.24xlarge
inf2.48xlarge
m5dn.24xlarge
m5dn.metal
NOTE: 22 entries were truncated, increase --max-results to see more

Short Table Output

$ ec2-instance-selector --memory 4 --vcpus 2 --cpu-architecture x86_64 -r us-east-1 -o table
Instance Type         VCPUs        Mem (GiB)
-------------         -----        ---------
c5.large              2            4
c5a.large             2            4
c5ad.large            2            4
c5d.large             2            4
c6a.large             2            4
c6i.large             2            4
c6id.large            2            4
c6in.large            2            4
c7a.large             2            4
c7i-flex.large        2            4
c7i.large             2            4
t2.medium             2            4
t3.medium             2            4
t3a.medium            2            4

Wide Table Output

$ ec2-instance-selector --memory 4 --vcpus 2 --cpu-architecture x86_64 -r us-east-1 -o table-wide
Instance Type   VCPUs   Mem (GiB)  Hypervisor  Current Gen  Hibernation Support  CPU Arch      Network Performance  ENIs    GPUs    GPU Mem (GiB)  GPU Info  On-Demand Price/Hr  Spot Price/Hr
-------------   -----   ---------  ----------  -----------  -------------------  --------      -------------------  ----    ----    -------------  --------  ------------------  -------------
c5.large        2       4          nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 10 Gigabit     3       0       0              none      $0.085              $0.0264
c5a.large       2       4          nitro       true         false                x86_64        Up to 10 Gigabit     3       0       0              none      $0.077              $0.025
c5ad.large      2       4          nitro       true         false                x86_64        Up to 10 Gigabit     3       0       0              none      $0.086              $0.0358
c5d.large       2       4          nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 10 Gigabit     3       0       0              none      $0.096              $0.036
c6a.large       2       4          nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 12.5 Gigabit   3       0       0              none      $0.0765             $0.0252
c6i.large       2       4          nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 12.5 Gigabit   3       0       0              none      $0.085              $0.0252
c6id.large      2       4          nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 12.5 Gigabit   3       0       0              none      $0.1008             $0.0359
c6in.large      2       4          nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 25 Gigabit     3       0       0              none      $0.1134             $0.043
c7a.large       2       4          nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 12.5 Gigabit   3       0       0              none      $0.10264            $0.0429
c7i-flex.large  2       4          nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 12.5 Gigabit   3       0       0              none      $0.08479            $0.0245
c7i.large       2       4          nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 12.5 Gigabit   3       0       0              none      $0.08925            $0.0367
t2.medium       2       4          xen         true         true                 i386, x86_64  Low to Moderate      3       0       0              none      $0.0464             $0.0135
t3.medium       2       4          nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 5 Gigabit      3       0       0              none      $0.0416             $0.016
t3a.medium      2       4          nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 5 Gigabit      3       0       0              none      $0.0376             $0.0108

Interactive Output

$ ec2-instance-selector -o interactive

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/68402662/184218343-6b236d4a-3fe6-42ae-9fe3-3fd3ee92a4b5.mov

Sort by memory in ascending order using shorthand

$ ec2-instance-selector -r us-east-1 -o table-wide --max-results 10 --sort-by memory --sort-direction asc
Instance Type  VCPUs   Mem (GiB)  Hypervisor  Current Gen  Hibernation Support  CPU Arch      Network Performance  ENIs    GPUs    GPU Mem (GiB)  GPU Info  On-Demand Price/Hr  Spot Price/Hr
-------------  -----   ---------  ----------  -----------  -------------------  --------      -------------------  ----    ----    -------------  --------  ------------------  -------------
t2.nano        1       0.5        xen         true         true                 i386, x86_64  Low to Moderate      2       0       0              none      $0.0058             -Not Fetched-
t4g.nano       2       0.5        nitro       true         true                 arm64         Up to 5 Gigabit      2       0       0              none      $0.0042             $0.0011
t3.nano        2       0.5        nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 5 Gigabit      2       0       0              none      $0.0052             $0.0011
t3a.nano       2       0.5        nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 5 Gigabit      2       0       0              none      $0.0047             $0.0022
t1.micro       1       0.6123     xen         false        false                i386, x86_64  Very Low             2       0       0              none      $0.02               $0.0024
t2.micro       1       1          xen         true         true                 i386, x86_64  Low to Moderate      2       0       0              none      $0.0116             $0.0029
t3a.micro      2       1          nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 5 Gigabit      2       0       0              none      $0.0094             $0.0033
t4g.micro      2       1          nitro       true         true                 arm64         Up to 5 Gigabit      2       0       0              none      $0.0084             $0.0046
t3.micro       2       1          nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 5 Gigabit      2       0       0              none      $0.0104             $0.0028
m1.small       1       1.69922    xen         false        false                i386, x86_64  Low                  2       0       0              none      $0.044              $0.0115
NOTE: 855 entries were truncated, increase --max-results to see more

Available shorthand flags: vcpus, memory, gpu-memory-total, network-interfaces, spot-price, on-demand-price, instance-storage, ebs-optimized-baseline-bandwidth, ebs-optimized-baseline-throughput, ebs-optimized-baseline-iops, gpus, inference-accelerators

Sort by memory in descending order using JSON path

$ ec2-instance-selector -r us-east-1 -o table-wide --max-results 10 --sort-by .MemoryInfo.SizeInMiB --sort-direction desc
Instance Type        VCPUs   Mem (GiB)  Hypervisor  Current Gen  Hibernation Support  CPU Arch  Network Performance  ENIs    GPUs    GPU Mem (GiB)  GPU Info  On-Demand Price/Hr  Spot Price/Hr
-------------        -----   ---------  ----------  -----------  -------------------  --------  -------------------  ----    ----    -------------  --------  ------------------  -------------
u7in-32tb.224xlarge  896     32,768     nitro       true         false                x86_64    200 Gigabit          16      0       0              none      $407.68             -Not Fetched-
u7in-24tb.224xlarge  896     24,576     nitro       true         false                x86_64    200 Gigabit          16      0       0              none      $305.76             -Not Fetched-
u-24tb1.112xlarge    448     24,576     nitro       true         false                x86_64    100 Gigabit          15      0       0              none      $218.4              -Not Fetched-
u-18tb1.112xlarge    448     18,432     nitro       true         false                x86_64    100 Gigabit          15      0       0              none      $163.8              -Not Fetched-
u7in-16tb.224xlarge  896     16,384     nitro       true         false                x86_64    200 Gigabit          16      0       0              none      $203.84             -Not Fetched-
u7i-12tb.224xlarge   896     12,288     nitro       true         false                x86_64    100 Gigabit          15      0       0              none      $152.88             -Not Fetched-
u-12tb1.112xlarge    448     12,288     nitro       true         false                x86_64    100 Gigabit          15      0       0              none      $109.2              -Not Fetched-
u-9tb1.112xlarge     448     9,216      nitro       true         false                x86_64    100 Gigabit          15      0       0              none      $81.9               -Not Fetched-
u7i-8tb.112xlarge    448     8,192      nitro       true         false                x86_64    100 Gigabit          15      0       0              none      $83.72              -Not Fetched-
u-6tb1.56xlarge      224     6,144      nitro       true         false                x86_64    100 Gigabit          15      0       0              none      $46.40391           -Not Fetched-
NOTE: 855 entries were truncated, increase --max-results to see more

JSON path must point to a field in the [instancetype.Details struct](https://github.com/aws/amazon-ec2-instance-selector/blob/5bffbf2750ee09f5f1308bdc8d4b635a2c6e2721/pkg/instancetypes/instancetypes.go#L3