Introducing Amazon EC2 I3en and C5n Bare Metal Instances

Posted on: Aug 9, 2019

Starting today, Amazon EC2 I3en and C5n bare metal instances are generally available. Amazon EC2 bare metal instances provide your applications with direct access to the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor and memory resources of the underlying server. These instances are ideal for workloads that require access to the hardware feature set (such as Intel® VT-x), or for applications that need to run in non-virtualized environments for licensing or support requirements.

Bare metal instances allow EC2 customers to run applications that benefit from deep performance analysis tools, specialized workloads that require direct access to bare metal infrastructure, legacy workloads not supported in virtual environments, and licensing-restricted applications. Bare metal instances also make it possible for customers to run virtualization secured containers such as Clear Linux Containers. Workloads on bare metal instances continue to take advantage of all the comprehensive services and features of the AWS Cloud, such as Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

I3en instances offer up to 60 TB of low latency NVMe SSD instance storage and up to 50% lower cost per GB over I3 instances. These instances are designed for data-intensive workloads such as relational and NoSQL databases, distributed file systems, search engines, and data warehouses that require high random I/O access to large amounts of data residing on instance storage. I3en instances also provide up to 100 Gbps of networking bandwidth and come in seven instance sizes, with storage options from 1.25 to 60 TB. I3en bare metal instances are available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Seoul), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland), US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), and US West (Oregon, N. California) regions. For more information, visit this page.

C5n instances are powered by 3.0 GHz Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Skylake) and provide support for the Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) instruction set. C5n instances make 100 Gbps networking available to network-bound workloads without requiring customers to use custom drivers or recompile applications. Customers can also take advantage of this improved network performance to accelerate data transfer to and from S3, reducing the data ingestion wait time for applications and speeding up delivery of results. A wide range of applications such as High Performance Computing (HPC), analytics, machine learning, Big Data and data lake applications can benefit from these instances. C5n bare metal instances are available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Mumbai, Sydney), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland), US East (N. Virginia, Ohio, AWS GovCloud), and US West (Oregon, AWS GovCloud) regions. For more information, visit this page.