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 270 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!
• Consumable as a go library

Installation and Configuration

curl -Lo ec2-instance-selector https://github.com/aws/amazon-ec2-instance-selector/releases/download/v1.3.0/ec2-instance-selector-`uname | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`-amd64 && chmod +x ec2-instance-selector

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 4096 --vcpus 2 --cpu-architecture x86_64 -r us-east-1
c5.large
c5d.large
t2.medium
t3.medium
t3a.medium

Find instance types that support 100GB/s networking

$ ec2-instance-selector --network-performance 100 -r us-east-1
c5n.18xlarge
c5n.metal
i3en.24xlarge
i3en.metal
inf1.24xlarge
m5dn.24xlarge
m5n.24xlarge
p3dn.24xlarge
r5dn.24xlarge
r5n.24xlarge

Short Table Output

$ ec2-instance-selector --memory 4096 --vcpus 2 --cpu-architecture x86_64 -r us-east-1 -o table
Instance Type        VCPUs        Mem (MiB)
-------------        -----        ---------
c5.large             2            4096
c5d.large            2            4096
t2.medium            2            4096
t3.medium            2            4096
t3a.medium           2            4096

Wide Table Output

$ ec2-instance-selector --memory 4096 --vcpus 2 --cpu-architecture x86_64 -r us-east-1 -o table-wide
Instance Type  VCPUs   Mem (MiB)  Hypervisor  Current Gen  Hibernation Support  CPU Arch      Network Performance  ENIs    GPUs    
-------------  -----   ---------  ----------  -----------  -------------------  --------      -------------------  ----    ----
c5.large       2       4096       nitro       true         true                 x86_64        Up to 10 Gigabit     3       0   
c5d.large      2       4096       nitro       true         false                x86_64        Up to 10 Gigabit     3       0    
t2.medium      2       4096       xen         true         true                 i386, x86_64  Low to Moderate      3       0    
t3.medium      2       4096       nitro       true         false                x86_64        Up to 5 Gigabit      3       0  
t3a.medium     2       4096       nitro       true         false                x86_64        Up to 5 Gigabit      3       0

All CLI Options

$ ec2-instance-selector --help

ec2-instance-selector is a CLI tool to filter EC2 instance types based on resource criteria.
Filtering allows you to select all the instance types that match your application requirements.
Full docs can be found at github.com/aws/amazon-ec2-instance-selector

Usage:
  ec2-instance-selector [flags]

Examples:
ec2-instance-selector --vcpus 4 --region us-east-2 --availability-zones us-east-2b
ec2-instance-selector --memory-min 4096 --memory-max 8192 --vcpus-min 4 --vcpus-max 8 --region us-east-2

Filter Flags:
      --allow-list string                 List of allowed instance types to select from w/ regex syntax (Example: m[3-5]\.*)
      --availability-zone string          [DEPRECATED] use --availability-zones instead
  -z, --availability-zones strings        Availability zones or zone ids to check EC2 capacity offered in specific AZs
      --baremetal                         Bare Metal instance types (.metal instances)
  -b, --burst-support                     Burstable instance types
  -a, --cpu-architecture string           CPU architecture [x86_64/amd64, i386, or arm64]
      --current-generation                Current generation instance types (explicitly set this to false to not return current generation instance types)
      --deny-list string                  List of instance types which should be excluded w/ regex syntax (Example: m[1-2]\.*)
  -e, --ena-support                       Instance types where ENA is supported or required
  -f, --fpga-support                      FPGA instance types
      --gpu-memory-total int              Number of GPUs' total memory in MiB (Example: 4096) (sets --gpu-memory-total-min and -max to the same value)
      --gpu-memory-total-max int          Maximum Number of GPUs' total memory in MiB (Example: 4096) If --gpu-memory-total-min is not specified, the lower bound will be 0
      --gpu-memory-total-min int          Minimum Number of GPUs' total memory in MiB (Example: 4096) If --gpu-memory-total-max is not specified, the upper bound will be infinity
  -g, --gpus int                          Total Number of GPUs (Example: 4) (sets --gpus-min and -max to the same value)
      --gpus-max int                      Maximum Total Number of GPUs (Example: 4) If --gpus-min is not specified, the lower bound will be 0
      --gpus-min int                      Minimum Total Number of GPUs (Example: 4) If --gpus-max is not specified, the upper bound will be infinity
      --hibernation-support               Hibernation supported
      --hypervisor string                 Hypervisor: [xen or nitro]
  -m, --memory int                        Amount of Memory available in MiB (Example: 4096) (sets --memory-min and -max to the same value)
      --memory-max int                    Maximum Amount of Memory available in MiB (Example: 4096) If --memory-min is not specified, the lower bound will be 0
      --memory-min int                    Minimum Amount of Memory available in MiB (Example: 4096) If --memory-max is not specified, the upper bound will be infinity
      --network-interfaces int            Number of network interfaces (ENIs) that can be attached to the instance (sets --network-interfaces-min and -max to the same value)
      --network-interfaces-max int        Maximum Number of network interfaces (ENIs) that can be attached to the instance If --network-interfaces-min is not specified, the lower bound will be 0
      --network-interfaces-min int        Minimum Number of network interfaces (ENIs) that can be attached to the instance If --network-interfaces-max is not specified, the upper bound will be infinity
      --network-performance int           Bandwidth in Gib/s of network performance (Example: 100) (sets --network-performance-min and -max to the same value)
      --network-performance-max int       Maximum Bandwidth in Gib/s of network performance (Example: 100) If --network-performance-min is not specified, the lower bound will be 0
      --network-performance-min int       Minimum Bandwidth in Gib/s of network performance (Example: 100) If --network-performance-max is not specified, the upper bound will be infinity
      --placement-group-strategy string   Placement group strategy: [cluster, partition, spread]
      --root-device-type string           Supported root device types: [ebs or instance-store]
  -u, --usage-class string                Usage class: [spot or on-demand]
  -c, --vcpus int                         Number of vcpus available to the instance type. (sets --vcpus-min and -max to the same value)
      --vcpus-max int                     Maximum Number of vcpus available to the instance type. If --vcpus-min is not specified, the lower bound will be 0
      --vcpus-min int                     Minimum Number of vcpus available to the instance type. If --vcpus-max is not specified, the upper bound will be infinity
      --vcpus-to-memory-ratio string      The ratio of vcpus to memory in MiB. (Example: 1:2)


Suite Flags:
      --base-instance-type string   Instance Type used to retrieve similarly spec'd instance types
      --flexible                    Retrieves a group of instance types spanning multiple generations based on opinionated defaults and user overridden resource filters


Global Flags:
  -h, --help              Help
      --max-results int   The maximum number of instance types that match your criteria to return (default 20)
  -o, --output string     Specify the output format (table, table-wide)
      --profile string    AWS CLI profile to use for credentials and config
  -r, --region string     AWS Region to use for API requests (NOTE: if not passed in, uses AWS SDK default precedence)
  -v, --verbose           Verbose - will print out full instance specs
      --version           Prints CLI version

Go Library

This is a minimal example of using the instance selector go package directly:

cmd/examples/example1.go

package main

import (
	"fmt"

	"github.com/aws/amazon-ec2-instance-selector/pkg/selector"
	"github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/aws"
	"github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/aws/session"
)

func main() {
	// Load an AWS session by looking at shared credentials or environment variables
	// https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-go/api/aws/session/
	sess, err := session.NewSession(&aws.Config{
		Region: aws.String("us-east-2"),
	})
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Printf("Oh no, AWS session credentials cannot be found: %v", err)
		return
	}

	// Instantiate a new instance of a selector with the AWS session
	instanceSelector := selector.New(sess)

	// Instantiate an int range filter to specify min and max vcpus
	vcpusRange := selector.IntRangeFilter{
		LowerBound: 2,
		UpperBound: 4,
	}
	// Instantiate an int range filter to specify min and max memory in MiB
	memoryRange := selector.IntRangeFilter{
		LowerBound: 1024,
		UpperBound: 4096,
	}
	// Create a string for the CPU Architecture so that it can be passed as a pointer
	// when creating the Filter struct
	cpuArch := "x86_64"

	// Create a Filter struct with criteria you would like to filter
	// The full struct definition can be found here for all of the supported filters:
	// https://github.com/aws/amazon-ec2-instance-selector/blob/master/pkg/selector/types.go
	filters := selector.Filters{
		VCpusRange:      &vcpusRange,
		MemoryRange:     &memoryRange,
		CPUArchitecture: &cpuArch,
	}

	// Pass the Filter struct to the Filter function of your selector instance
	instanceTypesSlice, err := instanceSelector.Filter(filters)
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Printf("Oh no, there was an error :( %v", err)
		return
	}
	// Print the returned instance types slice
	fmt.Println(instanceTypesSlice)
}

Execute the example:

NOTE: Make sure you have AWS credentials setup

$ git clone https://github.com/aws/amazon-ec2-instance-selector.git
$ cd amazon-ec2-instance-selector/
$ go run cmd/examples/example1.go
[c1.medium c3.large c4.large c5.large c5d.large t2.medium t3.medium t3.micro t3.small t3a.medium t3a.micro t3a.small]

Building

For build instructions please consult BUILD.md.

Communication

If you've run into a bug or have a new feature request, please open an issue.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read our guidelines and our Code of Conduct.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License.