Posted On: May 16, 2022

Starting today, Amazon EC2 I4i metal instances are available in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Regions - US East (Ohio and N. Virginia), US West (Oregon) and Europe (Ireland). Designed for storage I/O intensive workloads, I4i 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 30% better compute price performance over I3 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). I4i metal instances deliver the highest local storage performance within Amazon EC2 and are designed for databases such as MySQL, Oracle DB, and Microsoft SQL Server, and NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Couchbase, Aerospike, and Redis where low latency local NVMe storage is needed in order to meet application service level agreements (SLAs).

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. Furthermore, I4i metal instances provide your applications with direct access to the 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor and memory resources of the underlying server. Workloads on I4i metal instances will also be able to benefit from 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). I4i metal instances will also make it possible for customers to run secured containers such as Clear Linux Containers.

I4i metal instances come with 128 vCPUs, and 1024 GiB of memory, providing more resources than those available in I3 metal size (72 vCPU and 512 GiB of memory). I4i bare metal instances give customers 75Gbps networking speed and 40Gbps of bandwidth for Amazon Elastic Block Store. Customers can also use Elastic Fabric Adapter on these instances, 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, see this article.

I4i metal instances offer up to 30 TB of NVMe storage from AWS Nitro SSDs. Nitro SSDs are NVMe-based and custom-designed by AWS to provide high I/O performance, low latency, minimal latency variability, and security with always-on encryption. I4i metal instances provide up to 60% lower storage I/O latency, and 75% lower storage I/O latency variability compared to I3 metal instances. 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 I4i instances page.