Posted On: Aug 23, 2021
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 M6i instances, expanding the 6th generation EC2 instance portfolio to include x86-based compute options. Designed to provide a balance of compute, memory, storage, and network resources, M6i 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. M6i 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 M5 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). 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), gaming servers, caching fleets, as well as for application development environments.
To meet customer demands for increased scalability, M6i instances provide a new instance size (m6i.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 512 GiB of memory, 33% more than the largest M5 instance. They also provide up to 20% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU compared to M5 instances. M6i give customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, twice that of M5 instances. Customers can use Elastic Fabric Adapter on the 32xlarge 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 optimal ENA driver for M6i, see this article.
These instances are generally available today in AWS US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions. M6i instances are available in 9 sizes with 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48, 64, 96, and 128 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 M6i instances page.