Category: Amazon EC2

Fifteen years ago today I wrote the blog post that launched the Amazon EC2 Beta. As I recall, the launch was imminent for quite some time as we worked to finalize the feature set, the pricing model, and innumerable other details. The launch date was finally chosen and it happened to fall in the middle […]

Last year, we introduced the sixth generation of EC2 instances powered by AWS-designed Graviton2 processors. We’re now expanding our sixth-generation offerings to include x86-based instances, delivering price/performance benefits for workloads that rely on x86 instructions. Today, I am happy to announce the availability of the new general purpose Amazon EC2 M6i instances, which offer up to […]

Update (August 23, 2023) – The retirement announced in this blog post is now complete. There are no more EC2 instances running with EC2-Classic networking. Update (July 29, 2021) – Added link to the Support Automation Workflow document & clarified link to AWS MGN pricing. Also updated the list of recommended instance types to favor […]

Update May 31, 2022 – io2 Block Express volumes now support Elastic Volumes and Fast Snapshot Restore. To learn more, read the What’s New announcement here. At AWS re:Invent 2020, we previewed Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes, the next-generation server storage architecture that delivers the first SAN built for the cloud. Block Express is […]

In what has now become an annual tradition (check out my 2016, 2017, 2019, and 2020 posts for a look back), I am happy to share some of the metrics from this year’s Prime Day and to tell you how AWS helped to make it happen. This year I bought all sorts of useful goodies […]

Weather forecasting, genome sequencing, geoanalytics, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and other types of high-performance computing (HPC) workloads can take advantage of massive amounts of compute power. These workloads are often spikey and massively parallel, and are used in situations where time to results is critical. Old Way Governments, well-funded research organizations, and Fortune 500 companies […]

Fixing production issues is one of the key responsibilities of system and network administrators. In fact, I’ve always found it to be one of the most interesting parts of infrastructure engineering. Diving as deep as needed into the problem at hand, not only do you (eventually) have the satisfaction of solving the issue, you also […]

We launched the first Graviton-powered EC2 instances in late 2018 and announced the follow-on Graviton2 processor just a year later. The dual SIMD units, support for int8 and fp16 instructions, and other architectural improvements between generations combine to make the Graviton2 a highly cost-effective workhorse processor. Today, you can choose between General Purpose (M6g and […]