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EC2 Gets New Instances Spanning General and Big Data Workloads
Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced a pair of new EC2 instance families this week at re:Invent 2017.
The new M5 instances are designed for general-purpose workloads that have higher performance requirements than the earlier "M" instances. Powered by custom Intel Xeon Platinum 8175M series processors, the M5 instances have a 14 percent better price-to-performance ratio per core than the M4, according to a blog post on Tuesday by AWS evangelist Jeff Barr.
There are six sizes in the M5 range. The smallest has 8GiB of RAM and supports two virtual CPUs (vCPUs) while the largest has 384GiB of RAM and support for 96 vCPUs. The full lineup is described in the table below:
The new M5 instance lineup. (Source: AWS/Jeff Barr)
The M5 instances are available in AWS' Northern Virginia, Oregon and Ireland regions, with more regions coming down the pipeline.
On the other end of the spectrum, AWS also released a new instance family optimized for Big Data and dense storage called the H1.
Available in four sizes, as shown in the table below, the H1 family is designed for Big Data workloads such as "MapReduce clusters [and] host distributed file systems," Barr said in a separate post.
The H1 instance family. (Source: AWS/Jeff Barr)
The H1 instances run on Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 processors and "provide more vCPUs and more memory per terabyte of local magnetic storage, along with increased network bandwidth" compared to the earlier D2 dense-storage instances, according to Barr.
The H1 instances are supported in AWS' Northern Virginia, Oregon, Ohio and Ireland regions.
The release of the M5 and the H1 instances comes on the heels of the debut of the I3 instance, the first instance to leverage AWS' new bare-metal hypervisor, which was released as a public preview at re:Invent this week.
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