EC2 Instance Update – C5 Instances with Local NVMe Storage (C5d)

As you can see from my EC2 Instance History post, we add new instance types on a regular and frequent basis. Driven by increasingly powerful processors and designed to address an ever-widening set of use cases, the size and diversity of this list reflects the equally diverse group of EC2 customers!

Near the bottom of that list you will find the new compute-intensive C5 instances. With a 25% to 50% improvement in price-performance over the C4 instances, the C5 instances are designed for applications like batch and log processing, distributed and or real-time analytics, ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding. Some of these applications can benefit from access to high-speed, ultra-low latency local storage. For example, video encoding, image manipulation, and other forms of media processing often necessitates large amounts of I/O to temporary storage. While the input and output files are valuable assets and are typically stored as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) objects, the intermediate files are expendable. Similarly, batch and log processing runs in a race-to-idle model, flushing volatile data to disk as fast as possible in order to make full use of compute resources.

New C5d Instances with Local Storage
In order to meet this need, we are introducing C5 instances equipped with local NVMe storage. Available for immediate use in 5 regions, these instances are a great fit for the applications that I described above, as well as others that you will undoubtedly dream up! Here are the specs:

Other than the addition of local storage, the C5 and C5d share the same specs. Both are powered by 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Platinum 8000-series processors, optimized for EC2 and with full control over C-states on the two largest sizes, giving you the ability to run two cores at up to 3.5 GHz using Intel Turbo Boost Technology.

You can use any AMI that includes drivers for the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and NVMe; this includes the latest Amazon Linux, Microsoft Windows (Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, Server 2012 R2 and Server 2016), Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE, and CentOS AMIs.

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind about the local NVMe storage:

Naming – You don’t have to specify a block device mapping in your AMI or during the instance launch; the local storage will show up as one or more devices (/dev/nvme*1 on Linux) after the guest operating system has booted.

Encryption – Each local NVMe device is hardware encrypted using the XTS-AES-256 block cipher and a unique key. Each key is destroyed when the instance is stopped or terminated.

Lifetime – Local NVMe devices have the same lifetime as the instance they are attached to, and do not stick around after the instance has been stopped or terminated.

Available Now
C5d instances are available in On-Demand, Reserved Instance, and Spot form in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), US East (Ohio), and Canada (Central) Regions. Prices vary by Region, and are just a bit higher than for the equivalent C5 instances.

— Jeff;

PS – We will be adding local NVMe storage to other EC2 instance types in the months to come, so stay tuned!