Availability of High I/O Amazon EC2 Instance Type for AWS

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced the availability of I2 instances, the next generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) storage-optimized high I/O instances based on SSD technology that provides customers with high random I/O performance.

I2 instances deliver more processing power with the advances of the Xeon E5-2670 v2 (formerly code-named Ivy Bridge-EP) processor, provide enhanced networking with lower latency, low jitter, and high packet-per-second performance, and are capable of delivering more than 365,000 random read IO/s and more than 315,000 random write IO/s across eight 800GB SSD instance storage volumes.

With these capabilities, I2 instances are suited for transactional systems, high-performance NoSQL databases like Cassandra and MongoDB, and other applications that benefit from high disk I/O performance.

“Many of our customers are running storage-optimized Amazon EC2 HI1 instances today for applications that benefit from very high random I/O performance. Customers have told us that they not only wanted even more high I/O performance, but also wanted smaller instance size options for their smaller database fleets,” said Matt Garman, VP, Amazon EC2. “I2 instances address these customer requests by enabling even better I/O performance, higher IO/s, more processing power, enhanced networking, and twice the memory of HI1 instances. Additionally, I2 instances come in more varied instance sizes than HI1 instances, ranging from 4 to 32 virtual CPUs.”

“As an organization that delivers scalable and powerful backends for our customers’ mobile and web applications, we are excited for the availability of I2 instances and their powerful performance capabilities. We host 180,000 applications on Parse using MongoDB and Cassandra and these applications need high memory and high IO/s. We have been eagerly awaiting I2 instances since we first learned of their IO/s benchmarks at AWS re:Invent and believe that these instances will seriously boost our ability to run large-scale, complex database deployments in Amazon EC2,” said Charity Majors, operations tech lead, Parse.

“As a real-time analytics platform for the digital advertising space, Metamarkets enables buyers, sellers, and ad marketplaces to understand and visualize large quantities of data. For our distributed, memory-mapped database that serves tens of terabytes of data, we currently use several HI1 instances for their fast I/O, high storage density, and high memory benefits. With more IO/s, twice the memory, and high-frequency Intel Xeon E5 processors, I2 instances have shown significant benefits in our internal benchmarks and are attractive for us to migrate to,” said Patrick McBride, head of technical operations, Metamarkets Group.

Customers can launch I2 instances using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, and third-party libraries. I2 instances are available in four instance sizes, with 4, 8, 16, and 32 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) respectively, and are initially available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), AsiaPac (Singapore), AsiaPac (Tokyo), and AsiaPac (Sydney) Regions. I2 instances can be purchased as On-Demand or Reserved Instances.