Introducing Amazon EC2 I4i instances
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 I4i instances. 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).
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 I4i instances. 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 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.
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, an Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) driver update may be required. For more information on the optimal ENA driver for I4i, see this article.
These instances are generally available today in AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland). 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.