Storage Optimized Amazon EC2 I8g Instances Powered by AWS Graviton4 Processors and 3rd Gen AWS Nitro SSDs

By Channy Yun (윤석찬), principal developer advocate, AWS cloud

We’re announcing the general availability of Amazon EC2 I8g instances, a new storage optimized instance type to provide the highest real-time storage performance among storage-optimized EC2 instances with the 3rd Gen of AWS Nitro SSDs and AWS Graviton4 processors.

AWS Graviton4 is the most powerful and energy efficient processor we have ever designed for a broad range of workloads running on EC2 instances using a 64-bit ARM instruction set architecture. AWS Nitro System SSDs are custom built by AWS and offer high I/O performance, low latency, minimal latency variability, and security with always-on encryption.

EC2 I8g instances are the 1st instance type to use 3rd Gen AWS Nitro SSDs. These instances offer up to 22.5TB local NVME SSD storage with up to 65% better real-time storage performance/TB and 60% lower latency variability compared to the previous-gen I4g instances. Based on the AWS Graviton4 processors, I8g instances deliver up to 60% better compute performance and 2 times larger caches compared to I4g.

I8g instances offer up to 96 vCPUs, 768GB of memory, and 22.5TB of storage to deliver more compute and storage choices compared with I4g instances.

Instance name	vCPUs	Memory (Gib)	Storage (GB)	Network bandwidth (Gbps)	EBS bandwidth (Gbps)
I8g.large	2	16	468	up to 10	up to 10 Gbps
I8g.xlarge	4	32	937	up to 10	up to 10 Gbps
I8g.2xlarge	8	64	1,875	up to 12	up to 10 Gbps
I8g.4xlarge	16	128	3,750	up to 25	up to 10 Gbps
I8g.8xlarge	32	256	7,500 (2 x 3,750)	up to 25	10 Gbps
I8g.12xlarge	48	384	11,520 (3 x 3,750)	up to 28.125	15 Gbps
I8g.16xlarge	64	512	15,000 (4 x 3,750)	up to 37.5	20 Gbps
I8g.24xlarge	96	768	22,500 (6 x 3,750)	up to 56.25	20 Gbps
I8g.metal-24xl	96	768	22,500 (6 x 3,750)	up to 56.25	30 Gbps

You can use I8g instances for I/O intensive workloads that require low latency access to data such as transactional databases (MySQL and PostgreSQL), real-time databases, NoSQL databases, (Aerospike, Apache Druid, MongoDB) and real-time analytics such as Apache Spark.

Additionally, I8g instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, which offloads CPU virtualization, storage, and networking functions to dedicated hardware and software to enhance the performance and security of your workloads. The Graviton4 processors offer you enhanced security by fully encrypting all high-speed physical hardware interfaces.

Things to know
Here are some things that you should know about EC2 I8g instances:

OS – EC2 I8g instances support Amazon Linux 2023, Amazon Linux 2, CentOS Stream 8 or newer, Ubuntu 18.04 or newer, SUSE 15 SP2 or newer, Debian 11 or newer, Red Hat Enterprise 8.2 or newer, CentOS 8.2 or newer, FreeBSD 13 or newer, Rocky Linux 8.4 or newer, Alma Linux 8.4 or newer, and Alpine Linux 3.12.7 or newer.
Networking – You can use I8g instances in storage intensive workloads that typically have burst network usage patterns. All I8g instance sizes have burst network bandwidth and can burst more than 60 minutes, depending on the instance sizes, to support the majority of the workloads requiring instance storage data hydration, backup, and snapshot over the network.
Migration – If you’re using I4g instances now, you will have straightforward experience migrating storage intensive workloads to I8g instances because these instances offer similar memory and storage ratios to existing I4g instances.

Available
Amazon EC2 I8g instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) AWS Regions through On-Demand instances, Savings Plans, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, or Dedicated Hosts.

Resources:
Give EC2 I8g instances a try in the Amazon EC2 console.
Learn more: EC2 I8g instances page
Send feedback to AWS re:Post for EC2 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.