Announcing the next generation of Amazon EC2 High I/O instance
We are excited to announce the I2 new instance type – the next generation of Amazon EC2 High I/O instances. I2 instances provide you the highest IOPS compared to all other Amazon EC2 instances. I2 instances are available in 4 sizes ranging from 4 to 32 vCPUs (i2.xlarge, i2.2xlarge, i2.4xlarge, and i2.8xlarge) and SSD-based instance storage ranging from 800 GB to 6400 GB. We recommend using I2 instances for transactional systems and high performance NoSQL databases like Cassandra and MongoDB.
I2 instances feature the latest generation of Intel Ivy Bridge processors - each virtual CPU (vCPU) is a hardware hyperthread from an Intel Xeon E5-2670 v2 (Ivy Bridge) processor. The largest of the I2 instances (i2.8xlarge) are capable of providing over 365,000 4 kilobyte (KB) random read IOPS and over 315,000 4 KB random write IOPS. Other I2 instance sizes provide proportionally lower IOPS. I2 instances support TRIM for better successive SSD write performance. I2 instances also support Enhanced Networking for low latency, low jitter, and very high packet per second performance. You can read more on how to Enable Enhanced Networking. For additional information visit I2 documentation.
I2 instances currently support Hardware Virtualization (HVM) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) only. To obtain the highest IOPS performance from I2 instances, we recommend you use the latest Amazon Linux HVM AMI or any Linux HVM AMI that has a Kernel version 3.8 or later. For additional information on this, read I2 documentation.
Compared with HI1 instances, I2 instances provide faster processors, three additional instance sizes, double the memory per vCPU, and 56% increase in SSD-based instance storage. i2.xlarge, i2.2xlarge, and i2.4xlarge support EBS-optimization and deliver dedicated throughput between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS.
I2 instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions. You can purchase I2 instances as On-Demand Instances or Reserved Instances.
To learn more about I2 instances, visit the Amazon EC2 Instance Types page.