Posted On: Nov 22, 2021
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 R6i instances. Designed for memory-intensive workloads, R6i 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. R6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over R5 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). These instances are SAP-Certified and are ideal for workloads such as SQL and noSQL databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches like Memcached and Redis, in-memory databases like SAP HANA, and real time big data analytics like Hadoop and Spark clusters.
To meet customer demands for increased scalability, R6i instances provide two new sizes (32xlarge and metal) with 128 vCPUs and 1,024 GiB of memory, 33% more than the largest R5 instance. They also provide up to 20% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU compared to R5 instances. R6i give customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, 2x that of R5 instances. Customers can use Elastic Fabric Adapter on the 32xlarge and metal sizes, 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 optimal ENA driver for R6i, see this article.
R6i instances are generally available today in AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland). R6i instances are available in 10 sizes with 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48, 64, 96, and 128 vCPUs in addition to the bare metal option. 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 R6i instances page.