Posted On: Nov 29, 2021
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of general purpose Amazon EC2 M6a instances. M6a instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC (code named Milan) processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz, deliver up to 35% better price performance compared to M5a instances, and 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances. Designed to provide a balance of compute, memory, storage, and network resources, M6a instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances. These instances are SAP-Certified and are ideal for workloads such as web and application servers, back-end servers supporting enterprise applications (e.g. Microsoft Exchange Server and SharePoint Server, SAP Business Suite, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL databases), web servers, micro-services, multi-player gaming servers, caching fleets, as well as for application development environments.
To meet customer demands for increased scalability, M6a instances provide two more instance sizes than M5a (32xlarge and 48xlarge), with up to 192 vCPUs and 768 GiB of memory in the 48xlarge size, twice that of the largest M5a instance. M6a also give customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, more than twice that of M5a instances. Customers can use Elastic Fabric Adapter on the 48xlarge size, which enables low latency and highly scalable inter-node communication. For optimal networking performance on these new instances, Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) driver update may be required. For more information on the optimal ENA driver for M6a, see this article.
These instances are generally available today in AWS Regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland). M6a instances are available in 10 sizes with 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48, 64, 96, 128, and 192 vCPUs. Customers can purchase the new instances via Savings Plans, Reserved, On-Demand, and Spot instances. To get started, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit the M6a instances page.