AWS Introduces New EC2 Instance powered by Ice Lake Processors

AWS has introduced a new EC2 instance, l4i, powered by the latest Intel Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) Processors featuring up to 30TB of local AWS Nitro SSD storage. The l4i instances are an excellent fit for MySQL, Oracle DB, and Microsoft SQL Server, and NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Couchbase, Aerospike, and Redis, where low latency local NVMe storage is needed to meet application service level agreements (SLAs). AWS also included a new larger instance size for the l4i, the i4i.32xlarge.

AWS has introduced a new EC2 instance, l4i, powered by the latest Intel Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) Processors featuring up to 30TB of local AWS Nitro SSD storage. The l4i instances are an excellent fit for MySQL, Oracle DB, and Microsoft SQL Server, and NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Couchbase, Aerospike, and Redis, where low latency local NVMe storage is needed to meet application service level agreements (SLAs). AWS also included a new larger instance size for the l4i, the i4i.32xlarge.

Nitro SSDs, part of the overall AWS Nitro System, are NVMe-based and custom-built by AWS to provide high I/O performance, low latency, and security with always-on encryption. The AWS Nitro System is the underlying platform for EC2 instances that enables a path to faster innovation and a further reduction in costs. It delivers benefits like increased security and new instance types.

Traditionally, hypervisors protect the physical hardware and bios, virtualize the CPU, storage, and networking, and provide a rich set of management capabilities. With the Nitro System, those functions were broken apart and offloaded to dedicated hardware and software, ultimately reducing costs by delivering practically all of the resources of a server to your instances.

The table below shows the specs for each i4i instance.

Instance Name	vCPUs	Memory (DDR4)	Local NVMe Storage (AWS Nitro SSD)	Sequential Read Throughput (128 KB Blocks)	Bandwidth
					EBS-Optimized	Network
i4i.large	2	16 GiB	468 GB	350 MB/s	Up to 10 Gbps	Up to 10 Gbps
i4i.xlarge	4	32 GiB	937 GB	700 MB/s	Up to 10 Gbps	Up to 10 Gbps
i4i.2xlarge	8	64 GiB	1,875 GB	1,400 MB/s	Up to 10 Gbps	Up to 12 Gbps
i4i.4xlarge	16	128 GiB	3,750 GB	2,800 MB/s	Up to 10 Gbps	Up to 25 Gbps
i4i.8xlarge	32	256 GiB	7,500 GB (2 x 3,750 GB)	5,600 MB/s	10 Gbps	18.75 Gbps
i4i.16xlarge	64	512 GiB	15,000 GB (4 x 3,750 GB)	11,200 MB/s	20 Gbps	37.5 Gbps
i4i.32xlarge	128	1024 GiB	30,000 GB (8 x 3,750 GB)	22,400 MB/s	40 Gbps	75 Gbps

i4i instances deliver up to 30% better compute price performance, 60% lower storage I/O latency, and 75% lower storage I/O latency variability compared to I3 instances. I4i instances also offer a new size with up to 128 vCPUs and 1,024 GiB of memory, twice the largest I3 instance size. The larger instance size allows users to consolidate workloads on fewer instances and save on per-core licensing costs.

The i4i.32xlarge instance supports 40 Gbps bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and up to 10 Gbps in the four smallest offerings. Networking bandwidth now supports up to 75 Gbps.

Amazon AWS continues to improve access, performance, and availability giving customers the ability to save costs and enhance the public cloud experience.

AWS l4i Page

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