Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), has released new general-purpose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.
The new EC2 instance family, called M4, is available in five sizes. It is centered on a custom Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 Haswell CPU that was specifically designed for Amazon Cloud. The chip has a 2.4GHz CPU speed and can be upgraded to 3.0GHz with Intel Turbo boost. AWS claimed that the chip was suitable for many workloads due to its balance of compute, memory, and network resources.
AWS announced last Thursday that M4 instances are suitable for a variety of applications, including relational and immemory databases, gaming servers and caching fleets. They also have the ability to batch process and business applications such as SAP and Microsoft SharePoint.
Enhanced Networking is used for larger instances. The largest instance provides 10 Gbps network speeds. The M4 instances can also be optimized for Amazon Elastic Block Store, (Amazon EBS) with different speed thresholds.
[Click on the image to see a larger view.] M4 EC2 Instance Speeds and Feeds (source : AWS). Exec Jeff Barr stated that Enhanced Networking “delivers upto 4 times the packet rate for instances without Enhanced Networking while maintaining consistent latency even under high network I/O” in a blog last week. “Enhanced Networking reduces the average latency between instances by at least 50% within placement groups. The M4 instances come pre-optimized with EBS by default. They also have dedicated network capacity for I/O operations. The instances can launch 64-bit HVM AMIs within a VPC.
The AWS Management Console and the AWS Command Line Interface can launch M4 instances. Or, you can use AWS SDKs or third-party libraries to code the instances. They are available in three U.S. regions, as well as select regions in Europe or Asia Pacific.
Barr also announced that some M3 and C4 instances would be receiving price reductions. Details can be found on the EC2 Pricing Page.
Next-Gen Amazon EC2 Instances Announced
