New EC2 Second Generation Standard Instances and Price Reductions

We launched Amazon EC2 with a single instance type (the venerable m1.small) in 2006. Over the years we have added many new instance types in order to allow our customers to run a very wide variety of applications and workloads.

The Second Generation Standard Instances
Today we are continuing that practice, with the addition of a second generation to the Standard family of instances. These instances have the same CPU to memory ratio as the existing Standard instances. With up to 50% higher absolute CPU performance, these instances are optimized for applications such as media encoding, batch processing, caching, and web serving.

There are two second generation Standard instance types, both of which are 64-bit platforms:

• The Extra Large Instance (m3.xlarge) has 15 GB of memory and 13 ECU (EC2 Compute Units) spread across 4 virtual cores, with moderate I/O performance.
• The Double Extra Large Instance (m3.2xlarge) has 30 GB of memory and 26 ECU spread across 8 virtual cores, with high I/O performance.

The instances are now available in the US East (Northern Virginia) region; we plan to support them in the other regions in early 2013.

On Demand pricing in the region for an instance running Linux starts at $0.58 (Extra Large) and $1.16 (Double Extra Large). Reserved Instances are available, and the instances can also be found on the EC2 Spot Market.

Price Reductions
As part of this launch, we are reducing prices for the first generation Standard (m1) instances running Linux in the US East (Northern Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions by over 18% as follows:

Instance Type	New On Demand Price	Old On Demand 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

There are no changes to the Reserved Instance or Windows pricing.

Meet the Family
With the launch of the m3 Standard instances, you can now choose from seventeen instance types across seven families. Let's recap just so that you are aware of all of your options (details here):

• The first (m1) and second (m3) generation Standard (1.7 GB to 30 GB of memory) instances are well suited to most applications. The m3 instances are for applications that can benefit from higher CPU performance than offered by the m1 instances.
• The Micro instance (613 MB of memory) is great for lower throughput applications and web sites.
• The High Memory instances (17.1 to 68.4 GB of memory) are designed for memory-bound applications, including databases and memory caches.
• The High-CPU instances (1.7 to 7 GB of memory) are designed for scaled-out compute-intensive applications, with a higher ratio of CPU relative to memory.
• The Cluster Compute instances (23 to 60.5 GB of memory) are designed for compute-intensive applications that require high-performance networking.
• The Cluster GPU instances (22 GB of memory) are designed for compute and network-intensive workloads that can also make use of a GPGPU (general purpose graphics processing unit) for highly parallelized processing.
• The High I/O instance (60.5 GB of memory) provides very high, low latency, random I/O instance performance.

With this wide variety of instance types at your fingertips, you might want to think about benchmarking each component of your application on every applicable instance type in order to find the one that gives you the best performance and the best value.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Theo]

It’s great with new instance types, more options means that it’s easier to get the right price/performance fit. Hower, it’s too bad that these new instances are EBS-only, considering the problems of EBS the last few years (almost all outages have been caused by EBS, or had a severe impact on EBS backed instances while non-EBS instances were unaffected). Are there plans on making these types available without having to back them by EBS?

[Nuutti Kotivuori]

I believe micro instances only have 613 MiB memory, instead of 1.7GiB. Unless, ofcourse, you've gone all christmas on us.

[Michael T]

Shame there's no ephemeral storage, so you're stuck with EBS, a single point of failure that has failed several times before and costs more to boot. You can count me out.

[Jeff Barr]

I apologize for the typo! The micro instance has (and always had) 613 MB of RAM.

[Dordokamaisu]

Great news, but it's not that great because we EU people have to wait till 2013 :) What about the price reduction on existing instances, will it be applied to EU region as well?

[Hassan Hosseini]

M3 is looking great! Are there any plans to add more of these instance types? M3 4XLs, 8XLs etc?

The lower prices are a bonus! All prices have been added and updated in PlanForCloud for users to forecast their cloud costs. I will be sending an email out to our users to give them the good news soon :)

Cheers,
Hassan

[Phil Hemmis]

Why only EBS?!

[Frederick Cheung]

How come m3.xlarge has only moderate IO (when m1.large and m1.xlarge have high IO) and neither of the new m3 instances can be EBS optimised ?

[Bryan T]

Lack of ephemeral disks is a huge impediment to me using these instances!

[Paul]

Please make all instance types available as both EBS and instance storage. Like Bryan, we don't use EBS backed instances (EBS adds an extra centralized point of failure which we can't take, we instead architect to allow for individual instances to fail) so we can't use these instance types.