Amazon Web Services (AWS) released five new EC2 bare metal instances. Bare metal instances are ideal for workloads that need direct access to the process and memory resources. AWS also released lower cost storage, EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA).
Amazon Web Services (AWS) released five new EC2 bare metal instances. Bare metal instances are ideal for workloads that need direct access to the process and memory resources. AWS also released lower cost storage, EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA).
There are several use cases where applications need to go straight to the CPU and memory or where users want to use their own hypervisor. Bare metal also has other benefits such as running specialized workloads that require direct access to bare metal infrastructure, legacy workloads not supported in virtual environments, and licensing-restricted Tier 1 business critical applications. Through bare metal instances users can run virtualization secured containers such as Clear Linux Containers. With direct access to Intel Xeon Scalable processors workloads can access hardware feature sets such as Intel VT-x.
With the above benefits in mind, AWS has released five new bare metal instances: m5.metal, m5d.metal, r5.metal, r5d.metal, and z1d.metal. M5 instances are for workloads such as web and application servers, back-end servers for enterprise applications, gaming servers, caching fleets, and app development environments with their balance of compute, memory, and networking resources. For those that need more of a memory intensive applications, AWS is offering the R5 instances. R5 would be more ideal for high performance databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches, mid-size in-memory databases, real time big data analytics, and other enterprise applications. Both the M5 and R5 have “-d” option with up to 3.6TB of local NVMe SSD storage. Finally, for those users that need both high compute performance and high memory, AWS offers the z1d instance. The z1d instance is ideal for electronic design automation (EDA), gaming, and certain relational database workloads with high per-core licensing costs.
Users of Amazon elastic file system (EFS) have a new tool at their disposal. For those that need to retain files with readily available access, but only need the access every once in awhile, there is now Amazon EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA). As one can infer from the name, this type of storage is for infrequently accessed data and save users costs that leveraged it. This process can be automated by users that choose to enable Lifecycle Management that automatically moves files that haven’t been used in 30 days from standard storage to EFS IA.
Availability
The new bare metal instances are available now as On-Demand instances, Reserved instances (3-Yr, 1-Yr, and Convertible), or as Spot instances. EFS IA is available now in all Amazon EFS regions.
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