Choose from a selection of almost 60 different instance choices with options for processors (Intel Xeon Scalable processor or AMD EPYC processor), instance storage (NVMe SSD), EBS volumes storage (up to 60 Gbps), networking (up to 100 Gbps), and instance sizes to optimize both cost and performance for your workload needs.

R5 instances support the high memory requirements of certain applications to increase performance and reduce latency. R5 instances deliver additional memory per vCPU and the largest size, r5.24xlarge, provides 768 GiB of memory, allowing customers to scale-up and consolidate their workloads on a fewer number of instances.

R5 instances are powered by the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances. This frees up additional memory for your workloads which boosts performance and lowers the $/GiB costs.

R5 and R5d instances feature either the 1st or 2nd generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series processor (Skylake-SP or Cascade Lake) with a sustained all core Turbo CPU clock speed of up to 3.1 GHz. R5 instances provide support for the Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) instruction set, offering up to 2x the FLOPS per core compared to the previous generation R4 instances. R5b, R5n and R5dn instances feature 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake) with a sustained all-core Turbo CPU frequency of 3.1 GHz. In addition to AVX-512, there is support for the new Vector Neural Network Instructions (AVX-512 VNNI) which will help speed up typical machine learning operations like convolution and inference. R5a and R5ad instances feature the AMD EPYC 7000 series processor with an all core turbo clock speed of up to 2.5 GHz. R5a instances offers up to 10% savings for customers who are looking to further cost optimize their Amazon EC2 compute environments.

R5n and R5dn instances leverage the fourth generation of custom Nitro card and Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) device to deliver up to 100 Gbps of network throughput to a single instance. These instances offer 4x the network bandwidth and packet process compared to the base R5 instances and are ideal for network intensive applications. Customers can also enable Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) on 12xlarge, 16xlarge, 24xlarge and .metal sizes of r5n and r5dn instances for low and consistent network latency.

R5b instances are the newest memory optimized instances that increase EBS performance by 3x compared to same-sized R5 instances, and deliver this increased performance at a lower cost. R5b instances deliver up to 60 Gbps bandwidth and 260K IOPS of EBS performance. The increased EBS performance of R5b instances enables customers to move their storage throughput-intensive workloads from on-premise to AWS, including relational databases and data analytics applications. For existing EC2 customers, it means that they can consolidate their workloads on fewer instances, or on smaller instance sizes by migrating from R5 to R5b. This enables customers to reduce both infrastructure and licensing costs, while benefitting from the security, scalability and reliability of Amazon EC2.

Local NVMe-based SSD block level storage physically connected to the host server is available on all R5d, R5dn, and R5ad instances. These instances are a great fit for applications that need access to high-speed, low latency local storage including those that need temporary storage of data for scratch space, temporary files, and caches.

R5 instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a rich collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware. By doing so, the AWS Nitro System enables high performance, high availability, and high security while also reducing virtualization overhead.