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InfoQ Homepage News Amazon Releases Five New EC2 Bare Metal Instances: M5, M5d, R5, R5d, and Z1d

Amazon Releases Five New EC2 Bare Metal Instances: M5, M5d, R5, R5d, and Z1d

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Amazon has announced the availability of five new Amazon EC2 bare metal instances. The new EC2 M5, M5d, R5, R5d, and z1d instances will provide applications with direct access to the Intel Xeon Scalable processor and memory resources of the underlying server. 

With the new bare metal instances, AWS customers can control the entire set of hardware resources. According to the blog post by Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS: 

  • M5 instances are designed for general-purpose workloads, such as web and application servers, gaming servers, caching fleets, and app development environments. 
  • R5 instances are designed for high-performance databases, web-scale in-memory caches, mid-sized in-memory. 
  • Z1d instances provide high compute performance and lots of memory, making them ideal for electronic design automation (EDA) and relational databases with high per-core licensing costs.

Note that the M5d and R5d variants also include 3.6 TB of local NVMe SSD storage.


Source: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/02/introducing-five-new-amazon-ec2-bare-metal-instances/

Barr also stated in his blog post that:

All of the instances are powered by the AWS Nitro System, with dedicated hardware accelerators for EBS processing (including crypto operations), the software-defined network inside of each Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), ENA networking, and access to the local NVMe storage on the M5d, R5d, and z1d instances. Bare metal instances can also take advantage of Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch, and other AWS services.

Various public cloud providers offer Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) running as Virtual Machines (VMs), which allow customers to have more control over the processor, storage and other resources. However, customers will have little control over the underlying hardware. With bare metal customers get much finer grain control over the underlying hardware. As a respondent on a Reddit post on the new bare metal instances by Barr stated:

Metal instances let you run your own virtualization or have access to the hardware directly in ways you can’t using standard EC2 instances. That said, a lot of people don’t want to manage their own virtualization and are happy to offload that to AWS and run all their workloads on a standard platform.

Amazon offers the EC2 M5, M5d, R5, R5d, and z1d as on-demand, reserved or spot instances - available in North-America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific regions. Furthermore, customers can provision the instances through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. 

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