Posted On: Apr 1, 2014

Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS Volumes and EBS-Optimized Instances


We are delighted to announce that Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS Volumes are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region.

Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS Volumes offer storage with consistent and low-latency performance, and are designed for applications with I/O-intensive workloads such as databases. Backed by Solid-State Drives (SSDs), Provisioned IOPS volumes support up to 30 IOPS per GB which enables you to provision 4000 IOPS on a volume as small as 134 GB. You can also stripe multiple volumes together to achieve up to 48,000 IOPS when attached to larger EC2 instances.

To enable Amazon EC2 instances to fully utilize the IOPS provisioned on an EBS volume, we’re also introducing the ability to launch selected Amazon EC2 instance types as EBS-Optimized instances. Provisioned IOPS volumes can achieve single digit millisecond latencies and are designed to deliver within 10% of the provisioned IOPS performance 99.9% of the time. For more information about instance types that can be launched as EBS-optimized instances, see Amazon EC2 Instance Types.

Amazon EC2 M3 Medium and Large Instance Sizes and Functionality


We are excited to announce the availability of two new Amazon EC2 M3 instance sizes, m3.medium and m3.large in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region.

Amazon EC2 M3 instance sizes and features: We have introduced two new sizes for M3 instances: m3.medium and m3.large with 1 and 2 vCPUs respectively. We have also added SSD-based instance storage and support for instance store-backed AMIs (previously known as S3-backed AMIs) for all M3 instance sizes. M3 instances feature high frequency Intel Xeon E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge) processors. When compared to previous generation M1 instances, M3 instances provide higher, more consistent compute performance at a lower price. To learn more about M3 instances, please visit Amazon EC2 Instance Types.

Learn More about AWS GovCloud (US) Region


Join us for our weekly AWS GovCloud (US) Region Office Hours on April 1st at 1pm EST to learn more about the AWS GovCloud (US) Region.