Jan 2010 I speculated that SSD’s would be part of AWS. I was off by when AWS would start using SSD.

When will solid state memory server be an option in AWS instances?

THURSDAY, JANUARY 7, 2010 AT 12:47AM

I was having another stimulating conversation in silicon valley last night, and one of the ideas that made sense is for solid state memory servers to be part of the cloud computing option. It’s just a matter of time. Amazon has their current instance offerings with a division of performance and memory.

Today AWS announced two more SSD powered services.

One, is a coming soon service I2.

Coming Soon - The I2 Instance Type - High I/O Performance Via SSD

Earlier today, Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels announced the upcoming I2 instance type from the main stage of AWS re:Invent!

The I2 instances are optimized for high performance random I/O. They are a great fit for transactional systems and NoSQL databases like Cassandra and MongoDB.

The instances use 2.5 GHz intel Xeon E5-2670v2 processors with Turbo mode enabled. They also benefit EC2's new enhanced networking. You will see significantly higher performance (in terms of packets per second), much lower latency, and lower jitter when you launch these instances from within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

We'll be releasing more information at launch time. Here are the basic specs to tide you over until then:

Instance Name vCPU Count RAM
Instance Storage (SSD)

i2.large 2 15 GiB 1 x 360 GB

i2.xlarge 4 30.5 GiB 1 x 720 GB

i2.2xlarge 8 61 GiB 2 x 720 GB

i2.4xlarge 16 122 GiB 4 x 720 GB

i2.8xlarge 32 244 GiB 8 x 720 GB

The i2.8xlarge instances will be able to deliver 350,000 random read IOPS and 320,000 random write IOPS. Numbers for the other instance types will be proportionally smaller, based on the number of SSD devices associated with the instance.

Stay tuned for more information about the I2 instances.

and EC2 instances with SSD.

A New Generation of EC2 Instances for Compute-Intensive Workloads

Many AWS customers run CPU-bound, compute-intensive workloads on Amazon EC2, often using parallel processing frameworks such as Hadoop to distribute work and collect results. This includes batch data processing, analytics, high-performance scientific computing, 3D rendering, engineering, and simulation.

To date these needs have been met by the existing members of our compute-optimized instance families -- the C1 and CC2 instance types. When compared to EC2's general purpose instance types, the instances in this family have a higher ratio of compute power to memory.

Hello C3
Today we are introducing the C3 family of droids instances. Compared to C1 instances, the C3 instances provide faster processors, approximately double the memory per vCPU and SSD-based instance storage.

As the newest member of our lineup of compute-optimized instances, the C3's were designed to deliver high performance at an economical price. The C3 instances feature per-core performance that bests that provided by any of the other EC2 instance types, at a price-performance ratio that will make them a great fit for many compute-intensive workloads.

Use the Cores
Each virtual core (vCPU) on a C3 instance type is a hardware Hyper-Thread on a 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 (Ivy Bridge) processor. There are five members of the C3 family:

Instance Name vCPU Count Total ECU RAM Local Storage Hourly On-Demand

c3.large 2 7 3.75 GiB 2 x 16 GB SSD $0.15

c3.xlarge 4 14 7 GiB 2 x 40 GB SSD $0.30

c3.2xlarge 8 28 15 GiB 2 x 80 GB SSD $0.60

c3.4xlarge 16 55 30 GiB 2 x 160 GB SSD $1.20

c3.8xlarge 32 108 60 GiB 2 x 320 GB SSD $2.40

Protocols
If you launch C3 instances inside of a Virtual Private Cloud and you use an HVM AMI with the proper driver installed, you will also get the benefit of EC2's new enhanced networking. You will see significantly higher performance (in terms of packets per second), much lower latency, and lower jitter.

Getting Technical
As you may have noticed, we are specifying the underlying processor type for new instance types. Armed with this information, you can choose to make use of specialized instructions or to tune your application to exploit other characteristics (e.g. cache behavior) of the actual processor. For example, the processor in the C3 instances supports Intel's AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions) for efficient processing of vector-oriented data in 256-bit chunks.

Some Numbers
In order to measure the real-world performance of the new C3 instances, we launched a 26,496 core cluster and evaluated it against the most recent Top500 scores. This cluster delivered an Rmax of 484.18 teraflops and would land at position 56 in the June 2013 list. Notably, this is over twice the performance of the last cluster that we submitted to Top500. We also built an 8,192 cluster, which delivered an Rmax of 163.9, putting it at position 210 on the Top500 list.

Launch One Now
The C3 instances are available today in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions. You can choose to launch C3 instances as On-Demand,Reserved Instances, or Spot Instances.

-- Jeff;