The M1 instance family, introduced starting in 2006, was the first general-purpose class, featuring Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors and moderate network performance. These previous-generation instances, which utilize the Xen hypervisor, include ephemeral instance storage, such as 4 x 420 GiB of SSD on the m1.xlarge, and were designed to provide a balanced mix of resources for diverse workloads.