AWS to Offer Third-Generation AMD EPYC-Based Amazon EC2 Instances

By Geoff Murase, Sr. Partner Marketing Manager at AWS

As customers bring more and more workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS), they are seeking to optimize for different characteristics like compute performance, memory, or throughput.

AWS has built the most reliable and secure global cloud infrastructure with the broadest and deepest portfolio. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides customers the most options for compute so they can tailor the infrastructure to their business needs and workloads.

AMD powered instances are integral to these offerings. To date, AWS has introduced 58 instances across 21 global regions using AMD EPYC processors, addressing a broad variety of workloads while giving customers more options.

Later this year, AWS plans to offer Amazon EC2 instances powered by the newly introduced third generation AMD EPYC processors. These instances will expand customer choice of compute options available on Amazon EC2, as well as take advantage of the higher performance and value of third generation AMD EPYC processors.

To learn more, sign up for alerts about Amazon EC2 instances powered by the third-generation AMD EPYC processors.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is an AWS Partner that manufactures and markets semiconductor solutions that meet the requirements of client, mobile, server, and embedded applications (IoT).

Background

AWS first introduced Amazon EC2 instances based on AMD EPYC processors in November of 2018 for both general purpose (M5a) and memory optimized (R5a) workloads. These instances, based on first-generation AMD EPYC processors, provide additional options for customers looking to achieve cost savings on their EC2 compute environment.

In 2019, we expanded our portfolio of AMD EPYC processor-based EC2 instances to include local disk variants (M5ad and R5ad), which add high-speed, low latency, local block storage to M5a and R5a instances. Later in 2019, AWS further added to our portfolio by introducing burstable general purpose instances (T3a) for workloads that don’t need high sustained compute power but experience temporary spikes in usage.

In 2020, AWS introduced compute optimized (C5a and C5ad) instances based on second-generation AMD EPYC processors, ideal for a broad set of compute-intensive workloads and offering the lowest cost per x86 vCPU in the Amazon EC2 portfolio. We also launched AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPU-based graphics optimized (G4ad) instances, enabling up to 45 percent better price performance for graphics-intensive workloads than comparable EC2 instances.

Customer Use Cases

Customer adoption of AMD EPYC processor-based EC2 instances has continued to grow over time as AWS has introduced new options for customers. For example, Capital One uses AMD EPYC processor-based R5a, M5a, T3a, and C5a instances to power much of its cloud-first approach to software development. These instances enable Capital One to provide highly-personalized customer experiences in the areas of credit cards, auto loans, banking, and savings products.

Another customer example is Sprinklr, a provider of enterprise software for customer experience management, which has achieved substantial savings on cloud costs by using M5a and R5a instances.

Customers seeking the cost savings and performance of AMD EPYC processor-based instances are able to migrate to these EC2 instances with very little effort. For example, Druva is a leading provider of cloud-based data protection and management that was able to successfully transfer their global capacity from legacy instances to AMD-powered ones in less than two weeks. Druva did so without any additional effort required from engineering teams, and achieved a savings of 10-15 percent.

Conclusion

At AWS, we are constantly innovating on behalf of our customers so they can run virtually any workload, with the highest performance, and the best price performance.

Amazon EC2 gives customers the most options for compute so they can tailor the infrastructure to their business needs, and AMD is integral to these offerings.

With the launch of AMD’s third-generation EPYC processors, we plan to add these processors to our growing portfolio of AMD EPYC processor-based EC2 instances later this year.

To learn more, sign up for alerts about Amazon EC2 instances powered by the third-generation AMD EPYC processors.