Introducing Amazon EC2 C5 Instances, the next generation of Compute Optimized instances

Posted on: Nov 6, 2017

Amazon EC2 C5 instances are the next generation of Amazon EC2’s compute optimized instances and are powered by 3.0 GHz Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Skylake). C5 instances are built using a new light-weight hypervisor, which provides practically all of the compute and memory resources to customers’ instances. As a result, C5 instances deliver the best price/compute performance in the EC2 product family, with a 25% improvement in price/performance compared to C4 instances and certain applications delivering greater than 50% improvement. C5 instances are ideal for running compute-heavy workloads like batch processing, distributed analytics, high-performance computing (HPC), machine/deep learning inference, ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.

C5 instances are available in 6 sizes and introduce a new larger size, c5.18xlarge, which provides 72 vCPUs and 144 GiB of memory that will allow customers to effectively consolidate workloads. Next generation Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and NVM Express (NVMe) technology provide C5 instances with high throughput, low latency interfaces for networking and Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS). C5 instances offer up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth and up to 9 Gbps of Amazon EBS bandwidth. C5 instances also feature significantly higher networking and Amazon EBS performance on smaller instance sizes. They provide support for the new Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) instruction set, offering up to 2x the FLOPS per core per cycle compared to the previous generation C4 instances. For a list of supported AMIs, visit the EC2 FAQ page.

C5 instances are offered as On-Demand, Reserved or Spot Instance in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) Regions. To learn more, visit the Amazon EC2 Pricing page.

To get started, visit the AWS Management ConsoleAWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs