Five More EC2 Instance Types for AWS GovCloud (US)

AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated AWS Region designed to allow US government agencies and customers to move sensitive workloads into the cloud. Today we are enhancing this Region with the addition of five more EC2 instance types. Instances of these types can be launched directly or through Auto Scaling groups.

Let’s take a look at the newly available instance types and review the use cases for each one.

HS1 – High Storage Density & Sequential I/O
EC2’s HS1 instances provide very high storage density and high sequential read and write performance per instance. They also offer higher storage density than other EC2 instances along with the lowest cost per GB of storage. These instances are ideal for data warehousing, Hadoop/MapReduce applications, and parallel file systems. To learn more about this instance type, read my blog post, The New EC2 High Storage Instance Family.

C3 – High Compute Capacity
The C3 instances are ideal for applications that benefit from a higher amount of compute capacity relative to memory (in comparison to the General Purpose instances), and are recommended for high performance web servers, and other scale-out compute-intensive applications. To learn more about the C3 instances, read A New Generation of EC2 Instances for Compute-Intensive Workloads.

R3 – Memory Optimized
R3 instances are the latest generation of memory-optimized instances. We recommend them for high performance databases, distributed memory caches, in-memory analytics, genome assembly and analysis, larger deployments of Microsoft SharePoint and other enterprise applications. The R3 instances support Hardware Virtualization (HVM) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) only. My recent post, Now Available – New Memory-Optimized EC2 Instances contains more information.

I2 – High Storage & Random I/O
EC2’s I2 instances are high storage instances that provide very fast SSD-backed instance storage optimized for very high random I/O performance, and provide high IOPS at a low cost. You can use I2 instances for transactional systems and high performance NoSQL databases like Cassandra and MongoDB. Like the R3 instances, the I2 instances currently support Hardware Virtualization (HVM) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) only. I described these instances in considerable detail last year in Amazon EC2’s New I2 Instance Type – Available Now!.

T2 – Economical Base + Full-Core Burst
Finally, the T2 instances are built around a processing allocation model that provides you a generous, assured baseline amount of processing power coupled with the ability to automatically and transparently scale up to a full core when you need more compute power. Your ability to burst is based on the concept of “CPU Credits” that you accumulate during quiet periods and spend when things get busy. You can provision an instance of modest size and cost and still have more than adequate compute power in reserve to handle peak demands for compute power. To learn more about these instances, read my recent blog post, New Low Cost EC2 Instances with Burstable Performance.

Available Now
These instance types are available now to everyone who uses AWS GovCloud (US). Visit the AWS GovCloud (US) EC2 Pricing Page to learn more.

— Jeff;