AWS Mastery for .NET Architects
Lesson 5 of 30 17% of course

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): Choosing the right instance for C# apps

15 · 8 min · 5/23/2026

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Virtual Servers in the Cloud

EC2 is the most flexible compute option. It's just a virtual machine where you have full 'Root' access to the OS (Windows or Linux).

1. Instance Families

Choose based on your workload:
- **T3/T4g:** Burstable (Dev/Test).
- **M5/M6g:** General Purpose (Standard APIs).
- **C5/C6g:** Compute Optimized (High-traffic logic).
- **R5/R6g:** Memory Optimized (Caching/DBs).

2. Graviton (ARM) vs x86

Modern .NET (6+) runs perfectly on **ARM (Graviton)** instances. These are 40% better price-performance than standard Intel/AMD instances. **Architect Tip:** Always try to run your .NET Linux containers on Graviton to save significant costs.

3. Architect Insight

Q: "Should I use Spot Instances for my production API?"

Architect Answer: "Only if your architecture is truly **Stateless** and **Resilient**. Spot instances can be 90% cheaper but can be terminated by AWS with a 2-minute warning. Use them for background workers or batch processing, but avoid them for your primary customer-facing API unless you have a highly-available Auto Scaling cluster that can handle sudden node losses."

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AWS Mastery for .NET Architects

On this page

1. Instance Families 2. Graviton (ARM) vs x86 3. Architect Insight
1. AWS Global Infrastructure
AWS Foundations: Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations VPC Deep Dive: Subnets, Route Tables, and Internet Gateways IAM (Identity and Access Management): The Principle of Least Privilege Security Groups vs Network ACLs: Handling traffic for .NET apps
2. Compute for .NET
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): Choosing the right instance for C# apps AWS Lambda: Serverless .NET with Native AOT ECS & Fargate: Containerizing .NET APIs at scale Auto Scaling Groups: Handling spikes in traffic
3. Storage & Databases
S3 (Simple Storage Service): Architecting a binary storage layer RDS (Relational Database Service): Managed SQL Server in the cloud DynamoDB Mastery: NoSQL for extreme scale ElastiCache: Boosting performance with Redis/Memcached
4. Networking & Content Delivery
Route 53: DNS management and health checks Application Load Balancer (ALB) vs Network Load Balancer (NLB) CloudFront: Accelerating frontend delivery via CDN API Gateway: Building a unified entry point for Microservices
5. Security & Compliance
AWS WAF: Protecting your APIs from common web attacks AWS Secrets Manager: Managing connection strings securely KMS (Key Management Service): Data encryption for .NET CloudTrail: Auditing your infrastructure changes
6. Messaging & Events
SQS (Simple Queue Service): Decoupling .NET services SNS (Simple Notification Service): Pub/Sub patterns in AWS EventBridge: Building an event-driven bus Step Functions: Orchestrating complex serverless workflows
7. Monitoring & DevOps
CloudWatch: Metrics, Logs, and Alarms for C# apps X-Ray: Distributed tracing for .NET Microservices AWS CodePipeline: CI/CD for .NET on AWS CloudFormation & CDK: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with C#
8. Optimization & Scale
Cost Optimization (FinOps): Reducing your monthly AWS bill Case Study: Migrating a legacy Monolith to a Cloud-Native AWS stack