AWS' new EC2 i3en instances boast more power and storage
After launching the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) i3 instances around two years ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made available the i3en instances, touted by the company as boasting a lower price per TB of storage and increased storage density.
In a blog post penned by AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr, the company said the new offering again came in response to customer needs, with users of the i3 instances using them to host distributed file systems, relational and NoSQL databases, in-memory caches, key-value stores, data warehouses, and MapReduce clusters.
He said customers had asked for a lower price per TB of storage, increased storage density to allow consolidation of workloads and scale-up processing, and a higher ratio of network bandwidth and instance storage to vCPU.
"[The I3en instances are] designed to meet these needs and to do an even better job of addressing the use cases," Barr wrote.
"These instances are powered by AWS-custom Intel Xeon Scalable (Skylake) processors with 3.1 GHz sustained all-core turbo performance, up to 60 TB of fast NVMe storage, and up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth."
Users can launch I3en instances today in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) Regions in On-Demand and Spot form, with the company making Reserved Instances, Dedicated Instances, and Dedicated Hosts available.
Also: AWS re:Invent 2018: A guide for tech and business pros (free PDF)
It follows the cloud giant in February expanding its EC2 offering with the addition of five new bare metal instances. AWS at the time said the new instances are meant to serve workloads that need direct access to the processor and underlying hardware, while still maintaining elasticity, scalability, and security.
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