EC2 instance types's exact network performance?

Question

I cannot find exact network performance details for different EC2 instance types on Amazon. Instead, they are only saying:

• High
• Moderate
• Low

What does this even mean? I especially want to know the exact amount of Traffic-OUT on each instance type.

I need to do live streaming and my stream bit rate will be 240kbps. So I need to know which instance type can handle how many concurrent viewers.

Answer 1

Almost everything in EC2 is multi-tenant. What the network performance indicates is what priority you will have compared with other instances sharing the same infrastructure.

If you need a guaranteed level of bandwidth, then EC2 will likely not work well for you.

Answer 2

FWIW CloudFront supports streaming as well. Might be better than plain streaming from instances.

Answer 3

Bandwidth is tiered by instance size, here's a comprehensive answer:

For t2/m3/c3/c4/r3/i2/d2 instances:

• t2.nano = ??? (Based on the scaling factors, I'd expect 20-30 MBit/s)
• t2.micro = ~70 MBit/s (qiita says 63 MBit/s) - t1.micro gets about ~100 Mbit/s
• t2.small = ~125 MBit/s (t2, qiita says 127 MBit/s, cloudharmony says 125 Mbit/s with spikes to 200+ Mbit/s)
• *.medium = t2.medium gets 250-300 MBit/s, m3.medium ~400 MBit/s
• *.large = ~450-600 MBit/s (the most variation, see below)
• *.xlarge = 700-900 MBit/s
• *.2xlarge = ~1 GBit/s +- 10%
• *.4xlarge = ~2 GBit/s +- 10%
• *.8xlarge and marked specialty = 10 Gbit, expect ~8.5 GBit/s, requires enhanced networking & VPC for full throughput

m1 small, medium, and large instances tend to perform higher than expected. c1.medium is another freak, at 800 MBit/s.

I gathered this by combing dozens of sources doing benchmarks (primarily using iPerf & TCP connections). Credit to CloudHarmony & flux7 in particular for many of the benchmarks (note that those two links go to google searches showing the numerous individual benchmarks).

Caveats & Notes:

The large instance size has the most variation reported:

• m1.large is ~800 Mbit/s (!!!)
• t2.large = ~500 MBit/s
• c3.large = ~500-570 Mbit/s (different results from different sources)
• c4.large = ~520 MBit/s (I've confirmed this independently, by the way)
• m3.large is better at ~700 MBit/s
• m4.large is ~445 Mbit/s
• r3.large is ~390 Mbit/s

Burstable (T2) instances appear to exhibit burstable networking performance too:

• The CloudHarmony iperf benchmarks show initial transfers start at 1 GBit/s and then gradually drop to the sustained levels above after a few minutes. PDF links to reports below:

• t2.small (PDF)

• t2.medium (PDF)
• t2.large (PDF)

Note that these are within the same region - if you're transferring across regions, real performance may be much slower. Even for the larger instances, I'm seeing numbers of a few hundred MBit/s.