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The small Standard Instance is:
Small Instance (Default) 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit or 64-bit platform
Does this mean that you get access to an entire physical CPU core? Or are you sharing a more powerful core with other instances?
Is your performance affected by other people sharing the same "physical core" or other hardware?
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A virtual core is a CPU with a separation between two areas of the processor. Virtual cores take on some of the processing of the computer without interfering with the other area. As opposed to physical cores, which has something that physically separates the cores, virtual cores do not have physical separation.
Amazon EC2 instances support multithreading, which enables multiple threads to run concurrently on a single CPU core. Each thread is represented as a virtual CPU (vCPU) on the instance. An instance has a default number of CPU cores, which varies according to instance type. For example, an m5.
An AWS vCPU is a single hyperthread of a two-thread Intel Xeon core for M5, M4, C5, C4, R4, and R4 instances. A simple way to think about this is that an AWS vCPU is equal to half a physical core.
You don't get a physical core for a small instance.
"One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. This is also the equivalent to an early-2006 1.7 GHz Xeon processor referenced in our original documentation." Amazon EC2 Instance Types
You can run cat /proc/cpuinfo to see what hardware you're on. For example I have a micro instance which has the underlying processor Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5430 @ 2.66GHz.
From my understanding 40% cpu in top equals 1 Compute Unit. So I can burst to 80% with my 2 Compute Unit's.
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this is rough estimate so take it for what its worth. Funny enough the micro instance out preformed both the small & medium instances.
I ran Passmark Proformance Test 8.0 on each instance below. Each was installed with Windows Server 2008 r2 basic config in Amazon's Virginia based data center.
AWS SIZE=======PASSMARK SCORE====SIMILAR SCORED CPU================ t1.micro=======963===============AMD Dual-Core Mobile ZM-80======== m1.small=======384.7=============Intel Celeron M 1.60GHz=========== m1.medium======961===============AMD Dual-Core Mobile ZM-80======== m1.large=======1249==============Intel Core2 Duo T6400 @ 2.00GHz=== m1.xlarge======3010==============AMD Phenom 2 X4 12000============= m3.xlarge======3911==============Intel Xeon X5365 @ 3.00GHz======== m3.2xlarge=====6984==============Intel Xeon E3-1220 V2 @ 3.10GHz=== Currently the m3.2xlarge would cost about $7169 pr year for a reserved instance or $1578 pr month on an on-demand instance. Most unmanaged dedicated hosting companies I've seen offer Intel Xeon E3-1200 setups for around $2000-2500 pr year. In my opinion AWS is great for scalability but very costly for anything long-term. As seems to be the case with any "cloud" based server systems.
------UPDATE Here is a great tool for measuring cloud hosting benchmarks.. http://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks
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