News
AWS Launches I3 Instances for I/O Workloads
Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Thursday took the wraps off its latest instance family, the I3.
First announced at last November's re:Invent conference, the new I3 instances are specifically designed for I/O-intensive workloads. These include "relational databases, NoSQL databases, search engines, data warehouses, real-time analytics, and disk-based caches," noted AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post.
"Designed for I/O intensive workloads and equipped with super-efficient NVMe SSD storage, these instances can deliver up to 3.3 million IOPS at a 4 KB block and up to 16 GB/second of sequential disk throughput," Barr wrote. "When compared to the I2 instances, I3 instances deliver storage that is less expensive and more dense, with the ability to deliver substantially more IOPS and more network bandwidth per CPU core."
There are currently six I3 instance sizes, ranging from the i3.large, which supports two virtual CPUs, to the i3.16xlarge, which supports up to 64. Barr provided the following statistics, including on-demand pricing for the Northern Virginia region.
Besides Northern Virginia, the I3 instances are available in 14 other AWS regions worldwide.
Supported platforms include Windows Server (2008 R2, 2012 R2 and 2016), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (version 6.5 or higher), Ubuntu (version 16.04 or 16.10), CentOS (version 7.0 or higher), SUSE Linux (version 12 or 11 with SP3), and Amazon Linux AMI.
"These instances support Hardware Virtualization (HVM) AMIs only, and must be run within a Virtual Private Cloud," Barr said.