Posted On: Apr 6, 2022
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 M6a and C6a bare metal instances. M6a and C6a instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC (code named Milan) processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz. M6a instances deliver up to 35% better price performance compared to M5a instances, while C6a instances deliver up to 15% better price performance compared to C5a instances, and offer 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances. M6a and C6a 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. M6a instances are SAP-Certified and a good fit for workloads such as web and application servers, back-end servers supporting enterprise applications, web servers, micro-services, multi-player gaming servers, caching fleets, as well as for application development environments. C6a instances are well suited for compute-intensive applications like batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly-scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.
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 business critical applications. They provide your applications with direct access to the 3rd generation AMD EPYC processor and memory resources of the underlying server. 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).
To meet customer demands for increased scalability, M6a metal and C6a metal instances come with 192 vCPUs, and 768 GiB and 384 GiB of memory respectively. These instances also give customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, which is more than twice that of M5a and C5a 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, an Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) driver update may be required. For more information on optimal ENA driver for M6a and C6a, see this article.
M6a metal instances are available in the following AWS Regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Europe (Ireland). C6a metal instances are available in the following AWS Regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland). These new bare metal instances can be purchased as 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 and C6a instances pages.