© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

Luke Hoban, Amazon EC2

Scott Burks, Pearson

November 2016

T2: From Startups to the EnterprisePerformance for a Low Cost

CMP304

What to Expect from the Session

• Review of EC2 instance families and the role of T2

• Deep dive on the T2 credit model

• Hear from Pearson about how they use T2

• Survey of great T2 workloads

• Tips for using T2 instances

T2: Background and History

• One of the fastest growing EC2 instance families

• t2.micro is free to try (aws.amazon.com/free)

2010 2014 2015 2016

t1.micro

t2.micro

t2.small

t2.mediumt2.nano

t2.large

t2.xlarge

t2.2xlarge

EC2 Instances: Overview

0.25

0.5

1

2

4

8

16

32

64

128

256

512

1024

2048

4096

1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256

RAM

vCPU

CoreEC2InstanceFamilies

C4

M4

R4

X1

EC2 Instances: T2

0.25

0.5

1

2

4

8

16

32

64

128

256

512

1024

2048

4096

1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256

RAM

vCPU

CoreEC2InstanceFamilies

C4

M4

R4

X1

T2

Amazon EC2 T2 Instances

Great performance at a low price…

...for workloads which do not need to use

the CPU all the time.

Tip: The majority of EC2 instances don’t use their CPU

heavily. T2 instances provide a lower cost option.

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

EffectiveECU

t2.large m4.large

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

EffectiveECU

t2.medium c4.large

T2: Performance

T2 burst performance is 40% higher than C4, 60% higher than M4.

If you don’t run out of credits, you get great performance.

Great Fit for T2: Occasional Bursts, Low Average

Example workload:

Continuous Integration

Average 24hr CPU:

~5%

Good fits:

t2.nano – t2.2xlarge

Great Fit for T2: Longer Bursts, Less Often

Example workload:

VDI, Line of Business

Average 24hr CPU:

~10%

Good fits:

LOB: t2.micro

VDI: t2.medium –

t2.2xlarge

Not a Fit for T2: Sustained High CPU Usage

Example workload:

Video Transcoding

Average 24hr CPU:

~80%

Good fits:

Not a good fit for T2

T2 Credit Model

T2 Credit Model

• A CPU credit provide the

performance of a full CPU core

for one minute

• An instance earns CPU credits

at a steady rate

• An instance consumes credits

when active

• Credits expire (leak) over time

T2 Credit Model

T2: Amazon CloudWatch Metrics

• Keep track of CPU

utilization and

credits in

CloudWatch

• Create alarms to

track when you run

out of credits

• Use for scaling

automatically

Pearson Higher Education

Pearson Higher Eduction

• Started building into Amazon EC2 in 2012

• 120 - Development teams

• Mostly in US and Sri Lanka

• 470 - Application

• Mostly new development for cloud

• Some legacy force fit to cloud

Pearson Higher Education — AWS footprint

• 6280 EC2 instances

• 600 Elastic Load Balancers

• 350 Tb of EBS volume storage

• 10000 Route 53 records

• 4 peered VPCs per region (dev, stg, prd, admin)

• 90% in Virginia

• Rest in Ireland, California, Oregon

• Adding Australia

Pearson Higher Education — T2 footprint

Currently:

• t2.micro - 120

• t2.small - 628

• t2.medium - 425

• t2.large - 16

T2 - 1189 (19% of total instances)

Estimated saving $11,000 - $20,000/month

Pearson Higher Education — Migration

May - July 2015 pushed all teams to migrate off cheaper M1

instances.

Two factors that could affect ability to migrate off M1:

• Use of ephemeral storage could affect any instance type.

• CPU utilization could affect ability to migrate to T2

Pearson Higher Education — Instance Migration

Recommendations:

• m1.small -> t2.small

• m1.medium -> t2.medium or m3.medium

• m1.large -> t2.large or m3.large

• m1.xlarge -> m3.xlarge

Pearson Higher Education — Migration

By the numbers:

• m1.small 1032 -> 378

• t2.small 0 -> 385

• m1.medium 574 -> 302

• t2.medium 0 -> 200

• m3.medium 400 -> 600

• m1.large 608 -> 338

• t2.large 0 -> 105

• m3.large 375 -> 625

Pearson Higher Education — Migration Results

• Estimated saving of $9K - $15K/month

• Good cleanup exercise (teams evaluated actual needs)

• T2.micro, T2.small, and T2.medium have increased

steadily after migration

Pearson Higher Education — T2 scenarios

Haproxy load balancers

• development - 140

• staging - 265

• production - 95

Why T2 works well as a load balancer:

• Low CPU requirement

• Good networking/$

Pearson Higher Education — size guidance for

network constrained instances (haproxy)

Cores Network Mb/s $/hour

t2.micro 1* 63 0.013

t2.small 1* 126 0.026

t2.medium 2* 253 0.052

m3.medium 1 296 0.067

t2.large 2* 501 0.104

c4.large 2 618 0.11

c4.xlarge 4 1260 0.22

*As long as the instance has low average CPU utilization.

Pearson Higher Education — iperf graph

Guess which ones

are T2

Note: Past performance is

not an indicator of future

results

Pearson Higher Education — T2 scenarios

Application instances

• development - 200

• staging - 225

• production - 125

Why T2 works well for the application layer:

• In development/staging with low CPU load, credits accumulate for the surges during testing

• Good memory/$ (Java heap)

Pearson Higher Education — size guidance for

memory constrained instances (application)

Cores Memory $/hour

t2.micro 1* 1 0.013

t2.small 1* 2 0.026

t2.medium 2* 4 0.052

t2.large 2* 8 0.104

r3.large 2 15 0.166

r3.xlarge 4 30 0.333

*As long as the instance has low average CPU utilization.

Pearson Higher Education - Summary

T2 instances grew from 0% to 19% of total EC2 instances

in last 18 months.

Estimated savings of $11k-$20k per month.

Right-sizing guidance for T2 instances supporting key

workloads – including load balancers (HAProxy) and app

servers (Java).

Tips for T2 Instances

Tip #1: Use T2 for the following top workloads

• Websites and web apps

• Development and test

• Proxies and load balancers

• Virtual desktops

• Continuous integration

• Enterprise line-of-business

Not a Great Fit: Batch compute, In-memory databases, etc.

Tip #2: Popular Migrations to T2

From To Benefits

M4.large T2.large 13% lower price, higher burst performance

C4.large T2.medium 50% lower price, more memory

M3.medium T2.medium 22% lower price, more vCPUs

C1.medium T2.medium 60% lower price, more memory

T1.micro T2.micro 35% lower price, more memory

M4.xlarge T2.xlarge 13% lower price, higher burst performance

Check your instances to see if their CPU utilization is a

good fit for T2.

Tip #3: T2 Launch Credits

T2 instances launch with 30 minutes of burst credits.

But - by default, only 100 instances per 24 hours per

account get launch credits.

Tips:

1. Monitor CloudWatch metrics to ensure instances do not

start with zero credits.

2. Request limit increase if launching more than 100

instances per 24 hours. (CI/CD, test environments, etc.)

Summary

T2 instances offer great performance at a low cost, for

workloads which do not need to use the CPU all the time.

You can use CloudWatch to understand the CPU utilization

of your workloads, including your T2 CPU credits.

From individuals and startups to large enterprises, T2 fits

into a wide variety of use cases.

Thank you!

Remember to complete

your evaluations!

CloudWatch: CPU Credit Balance and Alarm

CloudWatch: CPU Utilization

CloudWatch: Create Alarm