Introducing Amazon EC2 R5 Instances, the next generation of memory-optimized instances

Posted on: Jul 25, 2018

Amazon EC2 R5 instances offer Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series processors with a sustained all core frequency of up to 3.1 GHz, with up to 50% more vCPUs and 60% more memory over R4 instances. R5 instances deliver 5% additional memory per vCPU and a 10% price per GiB improvement over R4 instances. R5 instances are ideally suited for applications such as high-performance databases, distributed in-memory caches, in-memory databases, and big data analytics.

R5 instances are the first memory optimized instances on EC2’s new Nitro system, which eliminates all virtualization overhead to deliver the best user experience. The largest size R5 instance provides 768 GiB of memory, allowing applications to scale up on fewer instances. R5 instances also deliver up to 20% increased CPU performance over R4 and support the new AVX-512 instructions. In addition, R5 instances add EBS-optimized burst support, enabling higher peak throughput for smaller sizes (up to 3.5Gbps). This allows customers to reduce costs by right-sizing instances based on their memory and compute requirements, and still get the EBS throughput they need. In addition, we are introducing R5d instances with local storage, offering up to 3.6TB of NVMe-based SSDs. 

In the coming weeks, we will be introducing an R5 bare metal instance that allows workloads running on third-party hypervisors to seamlessly move to EC2.

Amazon EC2 R5 instances are available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) AWS regions. R5d instances with local storage are available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) AWS regions. To learn more about R5 and R5d instances, visit Amazon EC2 R5 Instances.