Amazon has launched a new set of standard instances for their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service that are optimised for “media encoding, batch processing, caching, and web serving.”
Amazon’s EC2 service allows anyone with an AWS (Amazon Web Services) account to launch a virtual machine on Amazon’s infrastructure, and then use it for whatever application they want to drive.
Since its launch Amazon has been increasing the number of options available to developers for the different kinds of instances that can be launched based on the performance characteristics needed by different kinds of applications. So now EC2 instances range from the micro instance (t1.micro) that feature 613MiB RAM and 2 ECU (EC2 Compute Units, Amazon’s base unit for performance), to the Cluster Computer Eight Extra Large instance that offers as much as 60.5 GiB RAM, 88 ECU and 3370 GB of local storage. Amazon offers instances optimized for faster I/O, CPU performance, GPU performance, and memory.
The newly launched second generation of Standard instances are:
- Extra Large Instance (m3.xlarge): 15 GB RAM, 13 ECU, 4 virtual cores, priced at $0.58 / hr
- Double Extra Large Instance (m3.2xlarge): 30 GB RAM, 26 ECU, 8 virtual cores, priced at $1.16 / hr
With the introduction of these new instance types there is also a reduction in price of the older first generation Standard instances.
| Instance Type | New Price | Old Price |
|---|---|---|
| Small | $0.065/hour | $0.08/hour |
| Medium | $0.13/hour | $0.16/hour |
| Large | $0.26/hour | $0.32/hour |
| Extra Large | $0.52/hour | $0.64/hour |
Amazon has also increased the maximum provisioned IOPS for EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes. With provisioned IOPS it is possible to use a storage with an improved level of performance. Now it is possible to provision up to 2000 IOPS for an EBS volume, which, according to Amazon, delevers “an order of magnitude more IOPS than you can expect from a high-end 15,000 RPM disk drive.”
