Posted On: Dec 28, 2015
You can now launch D2 instances, the latest generation of Amazon EC2 Dense-storage instances. D2 instances are designed for workloads that require high sequential read and write access to very large data sets, such as Hadoop distributed computing, massively parallel processing data warehousing, and log processing applications.
The largest D2 instance, d2.8xlarge, offers up to 48 TB of instance storage and can deliver up to 3.5 GBps read and 3.1 GBps write disk throughput with a 2 MiB block size. D2 instances are powered by Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 (Haswell) processors that run at a base clock frequency of 2.4 GHz and can deliver clock speeds as high as 3.0 GHz with Intel Turbo Boost. D2 instances also offer Amazon EC2 Enhanced Networking (when used in Amazon VPC) for high packet per second performance, low network jitter, and low network latencies. D2 instances are available in four instance sizes with following specifications:
| Instance Size | # vCPUs | Memory (GiB) | Instance Storage (HDD) | Network Performance | Disk Read (MBps with 2 MiB block size) |
| d2.xlarge | 4 | 30.5 | 3 x 2 TB | Moderate | 438 |
| d2.2xlarge | 8 | 61 | 6 x 2 TB | High | 875 |
| d2.4xlarge | 16 | 122 | 12 x 2 TB | High | 1,750 |
| d2.8xlarge | 36 | 244 | 24 x 2 TB | 10 Gbps | 3,500 |
You can launch D2 instances through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface, and the Amazon EC2 API.
To learn more about D2 and other Amazon EC2 instances, visit the Amazon EC2 Instances page and the Amazon EC2 User Guide's section on D2 instances.