In m8g.large, m is the family, 8 the generation, g the processor (Graviton, AWS 24 's ARM chip; i is Intel, a AMD) and large the size. Web work uses t (burstable), m (general), c (compute) and r (memory, for databases). A t instance earns CPU credits at a fixed rate: a t4g.micro earns enough for 10% of each of its two vCPUs. It launches in unlimited mode, so it never throttles, but a 24-hour average above that baseline is billed extra; a busy site belongs on m. Apache 129 , PHP and MySQL 524 run natively on ARM, and on 23 September 2026 a t4g.micro cost USD 0.0084 an hour in us-east-1 against USD 0.0104 for the Intel t3.micro, both with 1 GiB of memory.
An AMI is the image an instance boots from. Canonical (account 099720109477) publishes the current Ubuntu 225 image ID, which changes with every rebuild and differs by Region, as an SSM parameter:
aws ssm get-parameter --query Parameter.Value --output text \
--name /aws/service/canonical/ubuntu/server/26.04/stable/current/arm64/hvm/ebs-gp3/ami-id
aws ec2 describe-images --image-ids ami-0abbb5421e6a3a16d \
--query "Images[0].[Name,OwnerId]" --output textami-0abbb5421e6a3a16d ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd-gp3/ubuntu-resolute-26.04-arm64-server-20260916 099720109477