Introducing T2, the New Low-Cost, General Purpose Instance Type for Amazon EC2

Posted on: Jul 1, 2014

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Amazon EC2 T2 instances. T2 instances are a new low-cost, General Purpose instance type that are designed to provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline. With On-Demand Instance prices starting at $0.013 per hour ($9.50 per month), T2 instances are the lowest-cost Amazon EC2 instance option and are ideal for web servers, developer environments, and small databases.

T2 instances are for workloads that don’t use the full CPU often or consistently, but occasionally need to burst to higher CPU performance. Many applications such as web servers, developer environments and small databases don’t need consistently high levels of CPU, but benefit significantly from having full access to very fast CPUs when they need them. T2 instances are engineered specifically for these use cases.

T2 instances are available in three sizes: t2.micro, t2.small, and t2.medium and work well in combination with Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes for instance block storage.

T2 instances are backed by the latest Intel Xeon processors with clock speeds up to 3.3 GHz during burst periods.

T2 instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Australia (Sydney), and Brazil (Sao Paulo) regions and coming soon to all other AWS Regions. T2 instances can be purchased as On-Demand and Reserved Instances, and are available for use in the Amazon EC2 Free Tier (t2.micro only). To learn more about Amazon EC2 T2 instances, see the Amazon EC2 details page.

Instance Type vCPU Memory (GiB)
t2.micro 1 1
t2.small 1 2
t2.medium 2 4