General Purpose (T3)
- What it is
- Balanced ratio of vCPU, memory, and networking.
- Default choice when no single resource is the bottleneck.
- T3 specifically is burstable
- Runs at a low baseline CPU, earns CPU credits while idle.
- Spends credits to burst above baseline.
- Cheap for spiky, mostly-idle workloads (small web servers, dev boxes, microservices).
- Family letters that also live here
T— burstable, cheapest, credit-based.M— steady-state general purpose, no credit system.
- Use cases
- Web servers, small databases, code repos, dev/test environments.
- Not to be confused with
- Compute Optimized (C5) — sustained high CPU, no bursting.
- Amazon Lightsail — a bundled, fixed-price VM product, not an EC2 instance family.