Five New Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances Available

This article comes from a blog of Amazon AWS written by Jeff Barr, chief evangelist, and published on February 14, 2019.

Now Available – Five New Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances: M5, M5d, R5, R5d, and z1d

Today we are launching the five new EC2 bare metal instances that I promised you a few months ago. Your OS runs on the underlying hardware and has direct access to the processor and other hardware. The instances are powered by AWS-custom Intel Xeon Scalable Processor (Skylake) processors that deliver sustained all-core Turbo performance.

Here are the specs:

The M5 instances are designed for general-purpose workloads, such as web and application servers, gaming servers, caching fleets, and app development environments. The R5 instances are designed for high performance databases, web scale in-memory caches, mid-sized in-memory databases, real-time big data analytics, and other memory-intensive enterprise applications. The M5d and R5d variants also include 3.6TB of local NVMe SSD storage.

z1d instances provide compute performance and lots of memory, making them for electronic design automation (EDA) and relational databases with high per-core licensing costs. The CPU performance allows to license fewer cores and reduce TCO for Oracle or SQL Server workloads.

All of the instances are powered by the AWS Nitro System, with dedicated hardware accelerators for EBS processing (including crypto operations), the software-defined network inside of each Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), ENA networking, and access to the local NVMe storage on the M5d, R5d, and z1d instances. Bare metal instances can also take advantage of Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch, and other AWS services.

In addition to being a great home for old-school applications and system software that are licensed specifically for use on physical, non-virtualized hardware, bare metal instances can be used to run tools and applications that require access to low-level processor features such as performance counters. For example, Mozilla’s Record and Replay Framework (rr) records and replays program execution with low overhead, using the performance counters to measure application performance and to deliver signals and context-switch events with high fidelity.

Paper, Engineering Record And Replay For Deployability

m5.metal instances are available in the US East (North Virginia and Ohio), US West (North California and Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Germany, Ireland, London, UK, Paris, France, and Stockholm, Sweden), and AsiaPac (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo) AWS regions.

m5d.metal instances are available in the US East (North Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, and Stockholm), and AsiaPac (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, and Sydney) AWS regions.

r5.metal instances are available in the US East (North Virginia and Ohio), US West (North California and Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, and Stockholm), AsiaPac (Mumbai, Seoul, and Singapore), and AWS GovCloud (US-West) AWS regions.

r5d.metal instances are available in the US East (North Virginia and Ohio), US West (North California), Europe (Frankfurt, Paris, and Stockholm), AsiaPac (Mumbai, Seoul, and Singapore), and AWS GovCloud (US-West) AWS regions.

z1d.metal instances are available in the US East (North Virginia), US West (North California and Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and AsiaPac (Singapore and Tokyo) AWS regions.

The bare metal instances will become available in even more AWS regions as soon as possible.