Posted On: Jan 17, 2018

C5 Instances, the next generation of the Amazon EC2 Compute Optimized instances powered by 3.0 GHz Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Skylake), were introduced in November 2017. C5 instances are built using a new light-weight hypervisor, which provides practically all of the compute and memory resources to customer’s workloads. 

Starting today, C5 instances are available in the AWS US West (N. California) and Europe (London), in addition to the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland) and EU (Paris) Regions. C5 instances are available in 6 sizes and introduce a new larger size, c5.18xlarge, which provides 72 vCPUs and 144 GiB of memory and purchasable as On-Demand, Reserved, Spot and as Dedicated Instances or Dedicated Hosts in these AWS Regions.

C5 instances are based on the Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and the lightweight Nitro Hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your 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.

To get started, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit the Amazon EC2 C5 instance page.