Amazon EC2 Nitro System Based Instances Now Support Faster Amazon EBS-Optimized Instance Performance

Posted on: Jul 31, 2018

Amazon EC2 C5/C5d and M5/M5d instances are built on the Nitro system, a collection of AWS-built hardware and software components that enable high performance, high availability, high security, and bare metal capabilities to eliminate virtualization overhead. With the latest set of enhancements to the Nitro system, we have increased the maximum EBS-optimized instance bandwidth to 14Gbps, up from 9Gbps and 10Gbps for C5/C5d and M5/M5d respectively. We have also increased the maximum EBS-optimized instance IOPS for Nitro systems to 80,000 IOPS, up from 64,000 IOPS and 65,000 IOPS for C5/C5d and M5/M5d respectively. In addition we have increased the EBS-optimized instance burst performance on the large, xlarge and 2xlarge C5/C5d and M5/M5d instances to 3.5Gbps, up from 2.25 Gbps and 2.12 Gbps respectively.

This performance increase enables you to speed up sections of your workflows dependent on EBS-optimized instance performance. For storage intensive workloads, you will have an opportunity to use smaller instance sizes and still meet your EBS-optimized instance performance requirement, thereby saving costs. With this performance increase, you will be able to handle unplanned spikes in EBS-optimized instance demand without any impact to your application performance.

All new C5/C5d and M5/M5d instances starting today will be able to take advantage of this performance increase at no additional cost. This performance increase is available in all AWS regions where C5/C5d and M5/M5d are available. For details on the performance increase for each instance size, please refer here.