R3: Announcing the next generation of Amazon EC2 Memory-optimized instances

Posted on: Apr 10, 2014

We are very excited to announce the immediate availability of the R3 instance type -the next generation of Amazon EC2 Memory-optimized instances. Our goal with R3 is to provide you with the best price point per GiB of RAM and high memory performance. R3 instances are available as On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, or Spot Instances with the following specifications.


Instance Sizes vCPUs Memory (GiB) SSD Storage (GB) Linux On-Demand Price* ($/hr) Linux Reserved Instances Upfront* Linux Reserved Instances Price*($/hr)
r3.large 2 15 1 x 32 $ 0.175 $ 1,033 $ 0.026
r3.xlarge 4 30.5 1 x 80 $ 0.350 $ 2,066 $ 0.052
r3.2xlarge 8 61 1 x 160 $ 0.700 $ 4,132 $ 0.104
r3.4xlarge 16 122 1 x 320 $ 1.400 $ 8,264 $ 0.208
r3.8xlarge 32 244 2 x 320 $ 2.800 $ 16,528 $ 0.416

* Pricing for US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon).

Compared to M2 and CR1 instances, R3 instances provide:

  • The latest Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge Processors
  • Support for Enhanced Networking that provides lower latency, low jitter, and very high packet per second performance
  • Higher sustained memory bandwidth - up to 63,000 MB/s
  • Faster random I/O Performance - up to 150,000 4kb random reads per second
  • Support for EBS optimization (r3.xlarge, r3.2xlarge, and r3.4xlarge only)

R3 instances are recommended for In-memory analytics, high performance databases including relational databases and NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, and MemcacheD/Redis applications. R3 instances support Hardware Virtualization (HVM) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) only. For additional information on this, or other technical information on R3, see R3 Documentation.

R3 instances are available in all AWS Regions except GovCloud (US), China (Beijing), and South America (São Paulo). To learn more about R3 and other Amazon EC2 instances, visit the Amazon EC2 Instances page.