Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is by far one of the oldest running services in AWS, and yet it still continues to evolve and add new features as the years progress. Some of the notable feature improvements and additions are mentioned here:

• Introduction of the t2.xlarge and t2.2xlarge instances: The t2 workloads are a special type of workload, as they offer a low-cost burstable compute that is ideal for running general purpose applications that don't require the use of CPU all the time, such as web servers, application servers, LOB applications, development, to name a few. The t2.xlarge and t2.2xlarge instance types provide 16 GB of memory and 4 vCPU, and 32 GB of memory and 8 vCPU respectively.
• Introduction of the I3 instance family: Although EC2 provides a comprehensive set of instance families, there was a growing demand for a specialized storage-optimized instance family that was ideal for running workloads such as relational or NoSQL databases, analytical workloads, data warehousing, Elasticsearch applications, and so on. Enter I3 instances! I3 instances are run using non-volatile memory express (NVMe) based SSDs that are suited to provide extremely optimized high I/O operations. The maximum resource capacity provided is up to 64 vCPUs with 488 GB of memory, and 15.2 TB of locally attached SSD storage.