Last month we launched the C5 Instances with Local NVMe Storage and I told you that we would be doing the same for additional instance types in the near future!

Today we are introducing M5 instances equipped with local NVMe storage. Available for immediate use in 5 regions, these instances are a great fit for workloads that require a balance of compute and memory resources. Here are the specs:

Instance Name vCPUs RAM Local Storage EBS-Optimized Bandwidth Network Bandwidth m5d.large 2 8 GiB 1 x 75 GB NVMe SSD Up to 2.120 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps m5d.xlarge 4 16 GiB 1 x 150 GB NVMe SSD Up to 2.120 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps m5d.2xlarge 8 32 GiB 1 x 300 GB NVMe SSD Up to 2.120 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps m5d.4xlarge 16 64 GiB 2 x 300 GB NVMe SSD 2.210 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps m5d.12xlarge 48 192 GiB 2 x 900 GB NVMe SSD 5.0 Gbps 10 Gbps m5d.24xlarge 96 384 GiB 4 x 900 GB NVMe SSD 10.0 Gbps 25 Gbps

The M5d instances are powered by Custom Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8175M series processors running at 2.5 GHz, including support for AVX-512.

You can use any AMI that includes drivers for the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and NVMe; this includes the latest Amazon Linux, Microsoft Windows (Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, Server 2012 R2 and Server 2016), Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE, and CentOS AMIs.

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind about the local NVMe storage on the M5d instances:

Naming – You don’t have to specify a block device mapping in your AMI or during the instance launch; the local storage will show up as one or more devices ( /dev/nvme*1 on Linux) after the guest operating system has booted.

Encryption – Each local NVMe device is hardware encrypted using the XTS-AES-256 block cipher and a unique key. Each key is destroyed when the instance is stopped or terminated.

Lifetime – Local NVMe devices have the same lifetime as the instance they are attached to, and do not stick around after the instance has been stopped or terminated.

Available Now

M5d instances are available in On-Demand, Reserved Instance, and Spot form in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), US East (Ohio), and Canada (Central) Regions. Prices vary by Region, and are just a bit higher than for the equivalent M5 instances.

— Jeff;