Posted On: Sep 13, 2021
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 VT1 instances powered by Xilinx® Alveo™ U30 media accelerators for video transcoding. VT1 instances are AWS’s first EC2 instances that feature hardware acceleration for video transcoding and are optimized for workloads such as live broadcast, video conferencing, and just-in-time transcoding. These instances deliver up to 30% lower cost per stream than Amazon EC2 G4dn GPU-based instances and up to 60% lower cost per stream than Amazon EC2 C5 CPU-based instances.
EC2 VT1 instances feature up to 8 Xilinx® Alveo™ U30 media accelerators, 192 GB of system memory, 25 Gbps of networking throughput, and 19 Gbps of EBS bandwidth as well as 2nd generation custom Intel Xeon Scalable processors. They support H.264 and H.265 video formats with resolutions up to 4K UHD. They are ideal for customers who are looking to lower their transcoding cost-per-stream or optimize their network bit-rate.
Customers can get started quickly with VT1 instances using the Xilinx Video SDK, which is integrated with FFmpeg making it easy to migrate existing applications to VT1 instances. Customers can launch VT1 instances using Xilinx AMIs available on AWS Marketplace that contain support for U30 accelerators or use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) or Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) for containerized applications.
VT1 instances are now available in the AWS US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions. Customers can purchase VT1 instances as On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, or as part of Savings Plan. VT1 instances will also be available on AWS Outposts soon for deployments in customers’ on-premises data centers, colocation facilities, or edge locations.
To get started with Amazon EC2 VT1 instances, visit the AWS Management Console. To learn more, visit our product details page.