Now Available – Five New Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances: M5, M5d, R5, R5d, and z1d

Today we are launching the five new EC2 bare metal instances that I promised you a few months ago. Your operating system runs on the underlying hardware and has direct access to the processor and other hardware. The instances are powered by AWS-custom Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor (Skylake) processors that deliver sustained all-core Turbo performance.

Here are the specs:

The M5 instances are designed for general-purpose workloads, such as web and application servers, gaming servers, caching fleets, and app development environments. The R5 instances are designed for high performance databases, web scale in-memory caches, mid-sized in-memory databases, real-time big data analytics, and other memory-intensive enterprise applications. The M5d and R5d variants also include 3.6 TB of local NVMe SSD storage.

z1d instances provide high compute performance and lots of memory, making them ideal for electronic design automation (EDA) and relational databases with high per-core licensing costs. The high CPU performance allows you to license fewer cores and significantly reduce your TCO for Oracle or SQL Server workloads.

All of the instances are powered by the AWS Nitro System, with dedicated hardware accelerators for EBS processing (including crypto operations), the software-defined network inside of each Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), ENA networking, and access to the local NVMe storage on the M5d, R5d, and z1d instances. Bare metal instances can also take advantage of Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch, and other AWS services.

In addition to being a great home for old-school applications and system software that are licensed specifically and exclusively for use on physical, non-virtualized hardware, bare metal instances can be used to run tools and applications that require access to low-level processor features such as performance counters. For example, Mozilla’s Record and Replay Framework (rr) records and replays program execution with low overhead, using the performance counters to measure application performance and to deliver signals and context-switch events with high fidelity. You can read their paper, Engineering Record And Replay For Deployability, to learn more.

Launch One Today
m5.metal instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (N. California and Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, and Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo) AWS regions.

m5d.metal instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, and Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, and Sydney) AWS regions.

r5.metal instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (N. California and Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, and Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, and Singapore), and AWS GovCloud (US-West) AWS regions.

r5d.metal instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (N. California), Europe (Frankfurt, Paris, and Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, and Singapore), and AWS GovCloud (US-West) AWS regions.

z1d.metal instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California and Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore and Tokyo) AWS regions.

The bare metal instances will become available in even more AWS regions as soon as possible.

— Jeff;