What is CPU Credit Balance in EC2 for AWS

Question

When I was going through the logs of EC2 instance i came across the term CPU Credit Balance. Can someone help me with as what is CPU credit balance?

Answer 1

Okay this what AWS Website says on these topics:

[T2 instances] The number of earned CPU credits that an instance has accrued since it was launched or started. For T2 Standard, the CPUCreditBalance also includes the number of launch credits that have been accrued.

Credits are accrued in the credit balance after they are earned, and removed from the credit balance when they are spent. The credit balance has a maximum limit, determined by the instance size. Once the limit is reached, any new credits that are earned are discarded. For T2 Standard, launch credits do not count towards the limit.

The credits in the CPUCreditBalance are available for the instance to spend to burst beyond its baseline CPU utilization.

When an instance is running, credits in the CPUCreditBalancedo not expire. When the instance stops, the CPUCreditBalancedoes not persist, and all accrued credits are lost.

CPU credit metrics are available at a five-minute frequency only.

Units: Credits (vCPU-minutes)

Answer 2

You can get to know more about this on the official documentation from Amazon

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

Answer 3

When you use fewer CPU resources then the level allowed then the unused CPU is treated as credit and the balance is stored as CPU credit for the next 1 day. This is known as CPU credit. That is basically the difference between what is earned and what is spent.