EC2 Updates: New Medium Instance, 64-bit Ubiquity, SSH Client

Big News
I have three important announcements for EC2 users:

1. We have introduced a new instance type, the Medium (m1.medium).
2. You can now launch 64-bit operating systems on the m1.small and c1.medium instances.
3. You can now log in to an EC2 instance from the AWS Management Console using an integrated SSH client.

New Instance Type
The new Medium instance type fills a gap in the m1 family of instance types, splitting the difference, price and performance-wise, between the existing Small and Large types and bringing our instance count to thirteen (other EC2 instance types). Here are the specs:

• 3.75 GB of RAM
• 1 virtual core running at 2 ECU (EC2 Compute Unit)
• 410 GB of instance storage
• 32 and 64-bit
• Moderate I/O performance

The Medium instance type is available now in all 8 of the AWS Regions. See the EC2 Pricing page for more information on the On Demand and Reserved Instance pricing (you can also acquire Medium instances in Spot form).

64-bit Ubiquity
You can now launch 64-bit operating systems on the Small and Medium instance types. This means that you can now create a single Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and run it on an extremely wide range of instance types, from the Micro all the way up to the High-CPU Extra Large and and the High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large, as you can see from the console menu:

This will make it easier for you to scale vertically (to larger and smaller instances) without having to maintain parallel (32 and 64-bit) AMIs.

SSH Client
We’ve integrated the MindTerm SSH client into the AWS Management console to simplify the process of connecting to an EC2 instance. There’s now  second option on the Connect window:

And there you have it! What do you think?

— Jeff;