EC2 Network Performance Cheat Sheet

What is the maximum network throughput of your EC2 instance? The answer to this question is key to choosing the type of an instance or defining monitoring alerts on network throughput.

Unfortunately, you will only find very vague information about the networking capabilities of EC2 instances within AWS's service description and documentation. That is why I run a network performance benchmark for almost all EC2 instance types within the last few days. The results are compiled into the following cheat sheet.

The data analysis in the following table shows the burst and baseline throughput of each instance type. The burst throughput is defined as the 95th percentile, which means the throughput was at least reached for 3 minutes. The baseline throughput is defined as the 10th percentile, which means the throughput was reached at least for 54 minutes.

I have run the network performance benchmark in `us-east-1` on April 12th, 2018 using  iperf3 . Each benchmark run took 60 minutes, and a data point was recorded every minute. A fresh  c5.18xlarge  was used as the counterparty for the network benchmark of each instance type.

Update: I run the network performance benchmark for  t3.* ,  i3.metal , and  z1d.*  at September 25th, 2018.

Please note, that the network benchmark was just a random sample and does not claim to be 100% accurate. Therefore, you should treat the EC2 Network Performance Cheat Sheet as the first guide when choosing an instance type based on your network throughput needs. If network throughput is critical to your infrastructure, you should run network benchmarks yourself to verify my results.

Looking for the network performance of other instance types? Check out my blog post on cloudonaut.io.