Choosing a flavor class¶

Flavor classes and flavors are often defined and grouped to help you select the right choice for your workload or application. The process of choosing the right flavor class and flavor is generally analogous to choosing the resources and specifications for physical hardware. Ultimately, choosing a flavor class and flavor depends on understanding your application needs (both now and in the future), and balancing those needs against the necessary amount and type of resources.

Some flavor classes are particularly well suited for specific workloads such as web servers and database servers.

Web servers and other horizontally scaling application tiers¶

Because Web servers such as Apache and Nginx typically derive their performance from network bandwidth, and to a lesser extent CPU and RAM, choosing a General Purpose flavor can often be the right decision. This flavor has ample network bandwidth, and CPU and RAM allocations that are suited to highly optimized web server applications.

Database servers¶

Database servers, such as those running SQL or NoSQL, often benefit from very fast disks and moderate to substantial amounts of RAM and CPU resources. Although these servers can be both vertically and horizontally scaled in different scenarios, the application resources needed can often remain significant. In these cases, an I/O flavor might be a good choice.