AWS has introduced a new EC2 instance, l4i, powered by the latest Intel Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) Processors featuring up to 30TB of local AWS Nitro SSD storage. The l4i instances are an excellent fit for MySQL, Oracle DB, and Microsoft SQL Server, and NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Couchbase, Aerospike, and Redis, where low latency local NVMe storage is needed to meet application service level agreements (SLAs). AWS also included a new larger instance size for the l4i, the i4i.32xlarge.
AWS has introduced a new EC2 instance, l4i, powered by the latest Intel Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) Processors featuring up to 30TB of local AWS Nitro SSD storage. The l4i instances are an excellent fit for MySQL, Oracle DB, and Microsoft SQL Server, and NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Couchbase, Aerospike, and Redis, where low latency local NVMe storage is needed to meet application service level agreements (SLAs). AWS also included a new larger instance size for the l4i, the i4i.32xlarge.
Nitro SSDs, part of the overall AWS Nitro System, are NVMe-based and custom-built by AWS to provide high I/O performance, low latency, and security with always-on encryption. The AWS Nitro System is the underlying platform for EC2 instances that enables a path to faster innovation and a further reduction in costs. It delivers benefits like increased security and new instance types.
Traditionally, hypervisors protect the physical hardware and bios, virtualize the CPU, storage, and networking, and provide a rich set of management capabilities. With the Nitro System, those functions were broken apart and offloaded to dedicated hardware and software, ultimately reducing costs by delivering practically all of the resources of a server to your instances.
The table below shows the specs for each i4i instance.
| Instance Name | vCPUs | Memory (DDR4) | Local NVMe Storage (AWS Nitro SSD) |
Sequential Read Throughput (128 KB Blocks) |
Bandwidth |
|
| EBS-Optimized | Network | |||||
| i4i.large | 2 | 16 GiB | 468 GB | 350 MB/s | Up to 10 Gbps | Up to 10 Gbps |
| i4i.xlarge | 4 | 32 GiB | 937 GB | 700 MB/s | Up to 10 Gbps | Up to 10 Gbps |
| i4i.2xlarge | 8 | 64 GiB | 1,875 GB | 1,400 MB/s | Up to 10 Gbps | Up to 12 Gbps |
| i4i.4xlarge | 16 | 128 GiB | 3,750 GB | 2,800 MB/s | Up to 10 Gbps | Up to 25 Gbps |
| i4i.8xlarge | 32 | 256 GiB | 7,500 GB (2 x 3,750 GB) |
5,600 MB/s | 10 Gbps | 18.75 Gbps |
| i4i.16xlarge | 64 | 512 GiB | 15,000 GB (4 x 3,750 GB) |
11,200 MB/s | 20 Gbps | 37.5 Gbps |
| i4i.32xlarge | 128 | 1024 GiB | 30,000 GB (8 x 3,750 GB) |
22,400 MB/s | 40 Gbps | 75 Gbps |
i4i instances deliver up to 30% better compute price performance, 60% lower storage I/O latency, and 75% lower storage I/O latency variability compared to I3 instances. I4i instances also offer a new size with up to 128 vCPUs and 1,024 GiB of memory, twice the largest I3 instance size. The larger instance size allows users to consolidate workloads on fewer instances and save on per-core licensing costs.
The i4i.32xlarge instance supports 40 Gbps bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and up to 10 Gbps in the four smallest offerings. Networking bandwidth now supports up to 75 Gbps.
Amazon AWS continues to improve access, performance, and availability giving customers the ability to save costs and enhance the public cloud experience.
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