Amazon EC2 I4i Instances are now available in nine additional regions

Starting today, Amazon EC2 I4i Instances are available in additional Amazon Web Services (AWS) Regions - US West (N. California), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, London, Paris). Designed for storage I/O intensive workloads, I4i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 30% better compute price performance over I3 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME).

I4i instances offer up to 30 TB of NVMe storage from AWS Nitro SSDs. Nitro SSDs are NVMe-based and custom-designed by AWS to provide high I/O performance, low latency, minimal latency variability, and security with always-on encryption. I4i instances provide up to 60% lower storage I/O latency, and up to 75% lower storage I/O latency variability compared to I3 instances. These instances deliver the highest local storage performance within Amazon EC2 and are designed for databases such as 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 in order to meet application service level agreements (SLAs). I4i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances.

I4i metal instances will also be made available to the customers in the 9 aforementioned regions starting today. I4i bare metal instances allow EC2 customers to run applications that benefit from deep performance analysis tools, specialized workloads that require direct access to bare metal infrastructure, legacy workloads not supported in virtual environments, and licensing-restricted business critical applications. Furthermore, I4i metal instances provide your applications with direct access to the 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor and memory resources of the underlying server. Workloads on I4i metal instances will also be able to benefit from the comprehensive services and features of the AWS Cloud, such as Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). I4i metal instances will also make it possible for customers to run secured containers such as Clear Linux Containers.

To meet customer demands for increased scalability, I4i instances provide a new instance size (i4.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 1,024 GiB of memory, which is twice that of the largest I3 instance. I4i instances give customers up to 75 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store. Customers can use Elastic Fabric Adapter on the 32xlarge size, which enables low latency and highly-scalable inter-node communication. For optimal networking performance on these new instances, Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) driver update may be required. For more information on the optimal ENA driver for I4i, see this article.

With this regional expansion, I4i instances are now available in the following AWS Regions: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (N. California, Oregon), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt, London, Paris), and Asia Pacific (Singapore, Tokyo). I4i instances are available in 7 sizes with 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, or 128 vCPUs. Customers can purchase the new instances via Savings Plans, Reserved, On-Demand, and Spot instances. To get started, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit the I4i instances page.