The sixth generation of Amazon EC2 instances powered by AMD processors now support faster Amazon EBS-optimized instance performance

Today, we are announcing an improvement for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) performance on Amazon EC2 compute-optimized C6a and general purpose M6a instance types, with similar improvement on R6a in the coming weeks.

EC2 C6a and M6a instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors and are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor. With the latest enhancements to the Nitro system, we have increased the maximum EBS-optimized IOPS by 60% on the 32xlarge instance size and 50% on all other instance sizes for the C6a and M6a instance types. The largest 48xlarge and metal sizes now have a maximum IOPS of 240,000, up from prior 160,000. Additionally, we have increased the maximum EBS-optimized bandwidth by 50% for instance sizes up to 32xlarge. With these improvements, the large to 4xlarge instance sizes can now achieve burst performance of 10Gbps and 40,000 IOPS.

This performance increase enables you to speed up sections of your workflows and handle unplanned spikes in EBS-optimized instance demand without impact to your application performance. For storage-intensive workloads, you will have an opportunity to use smaller instance sizes and still meet your performance requirements, thereby saving costs.

All new C6a and M6a instances starting today will utilize this performance increase at no additional cost, with support for R6a in the coming weeks. For existing instances, you can simply stop and start your instances to enable this performance increase. This change is available in all AWS regions where C6a and M6a are available. Please visit the EBS-optimized instance page for more details on the performance increase.