AWS: Next Generation (I3en) of I/O-Optimized EC2 Instances

by Jeff Barr, chief evangelist , on a blog of AWS on May 8, 2019

New – The Next Generation (I3en) of I/O-Optimized EC2 Instances

Amazon‘s customer obsession leadership principle says:

Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

Starting from the customer and working backwards means that we do not invent in a vacuum. Instead, we speak directly to our customers (both external and internal), ask detailed questions, and pay attention to what we learn. On the AWS side, we often hear about new use cases that help us to get a better understanding of what our customers are doing with AWS. For example, large-scale EC2 users provide us with another set of interesting data points, often expressed in terms of ratios between dollars, vCPUs, memory size, storage size, and networking throughput.

We launched the I3 instances (Available – I3 Instances for Demanding, I/O Intensive Workloads) just about two years ago. Our customers use them to host distributed file systems, relational and NoSQL databases, in-memory caches, key-value stores, data warehouses, and MapReduce clusters. Because our customers are always (in Jeff Bezos’ words) ‘divinely discontent’, they want I/O-optimized instances with even more power and storage.

To be specific, they have asked us for:

• Lower price/TB of storage

• Increased storage density to allow consolidation of workloads and scale-up processing

• higher ratio of network bandwidth and instance storage to vCPUs

The crucial element here is that our customers were able to express their needs in a detailed and specific manner. Simply asking for something to be better, faster, and cheaper does not help us to make well-informed decisions.

New I3en Instances
AWS announces the I3en instances. Designed to meet these needs and to do a better job of addressing the use cases that I mentioned above, these instances are powered by AWS-custom Xeon Scalable (Skylake) processors with 3.1GHz sustained all-core turbo performance, up to 60TB of fast NVMe storage, and up to 100Gb of network bandwidth.

Here are the specs:

In comparison to t I3 instances, the I3en instances offer:

• A cost/GB of SSD instance storage that is up to 50% lower

• Storage density (GB/vCPU) that is roughly 2.6x greater

• Ratio of network bandwidth to vCPUs that is up to 2.7x greater

You will need HVM AMIs with the NVMe 1.0e and ENA drivers. You can also make use of the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) if you are using the i3en.24xlarge (read my recent post to learn more).

You can launch I3en instances in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) regions in On-Demand and Spot form. Reserved Instances, Dedicated Instances, and Dedicated Hosts are available.

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