Set the Instance Type

Aug 2017

When creating an Instance, you have many choices for hardware, these choices include (but are not limited to:)

How many CPUs (vCPU)
How much RAM
How much Hard Disk Space
Permanent Storage (S3 Buckets)
Data transfer per month
DHCP or Elastic IP Addresses

For a server that is hosting thousands of people, this will require some dimensioning to calculate the projected requirements. However, for our test script we can use the lowest available (and free while in your free tier period) Instance.
When you manually create an EC2 Instance, you will be presented with a list of options regarding the Instance Type, here is part of that list of options:
Above we can see that the t2.micro is the default free tier server, and this is the one we shall use in our example. The t2.micro has the following hardware specification.

t2.micro (Variable ECUs, 1 vCPUs, 2.5 GHz, Intel Xeon Family, 1 GiB memory, EBS only)

So for our script, the instance type will be:

instance_type = "t2.micro"