AWS GovCloud (US) region expands EC2 offering with the addition of HS1, C3, I2, R3 and T2 instance types

Posted on: Sep 4, 2014

The AWS GovCloud (US) region is an isolated AWS region designed to allow US government agencies and customers to move sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.

Today, we are expanding the EC2 offerings in the region by adding five additional instance types: HS1, C3, I2, R3, and T2 that you can launch independently or control via Auto Scaling groups.

HS1 instances provide very high storage density and high sequential read and write performance per instance. It also offers the highest storage density among other EC2 instances and is lowest on $/GB storage. HS1 is ideal for data warehousing, Hadoop/MapReduce applications, and parallel file systems.

C3 instances are the latest generation of compute-optimized instances and are ideal for applications that benefit from a higher amount of compute capacity relative to memory, and are recommended for high performance web servers, and other scale-out compute-intensive applications. C3 instances feature highest per-core performance than any other EC2 instance types.

I2 instances are the second generation of High I/O instances that provide very fast SSD-backed instance storage optimized for very high random I/O performance, and provide high IOPS at a low cost. We recommend using I2 instances for transactional systems and high performance NoSQL databases like Cassandra and MongoDB. I2 instances currently support Hardware Virtualization (HVM) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) only.

R3 instances are the latest generation of memory-optimized instances. We recommend memory-optimized instances for high performance databases, distributed memory caches, and in-memory applications. R3 instances provide the best price point per GiB of RAM among other EC2 instances. Like I2 instances, R3 instances support Hardware Virtualization (HVM) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) only.

T2 instances are built around a processing allocation model that provides you a generous, assured baseline amount of processing power coupled with the ability to automatically and transparently scale up to a full core when you need more compute power. Your ability to burst is based on the concept of "CPU Credits" that you accumulate during quiet periods and spend when things get busy. You can provision an instance of modest size and cost and still have more than adequate compute power in reserve to handle peak demands for compute power.

For pricing information, visit the AWS GovCloud (US) EC2 pricing page. To learn more about these instance types, visit the Amazon EC2 Instance Types page. To launch these instances in the AWS GovCloud (US) region, go to the AWS Management Console for the GovCloud region.