Amazon’s Customer Obsession leadership principle says:

Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

Starting from the customer and working backwards means that we do not invent in a vacuum. Instead, we speak directly to our customers (both external and internal), ask detailed questions, and pay attention to what we learn. On the AWS side, we often hear about new use cases that help us to get a better understanding of what our customers are doing with AWS. For example, large-scale EC2 users provide us with another set of interesting data points, often expressed in terms of ratios between dollars, vCPUs, memory size, storage size, and networking throughput.

We launched the I3 instances (Now Available – I3 Instances for Demanding, I/O Intensive Workloads) just about two years ago. Our customers use them to host distributed file systems, relational & NoSQL databases, in-memory caches, key-value stores, data warehouses, and MapReduce clusters. Because our customers are always (in Jeff Bezos’ words) “divinely discontent”, they want I/O-optimized instances with even more power & storage. To be specific, they have asked us for:

A lower price per TB of storage

Increased storage density to allow consolidation of workloads and scale-up processing

A higher ratio of network bandwidth and instance storage to vCPUs

The crucial element here is that our customers were able to express their needs in a detailed and specific manner. Simply asking for something to be better, faster, and cheaper does not help us to make well-informed decisions.

New I3en Instances

Today I am happy to announce the I3en instances. Designed to meet these needs and to do an even better job of addressing the use cases that I mentioned above, these instances are powered by AWS-custom Intel Xeon Scalable (Skylake) processors with 3.1 GHz sustained all-core turbo performance, up to 60 TB of fast NVMe storage, and up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth. Here are the specs:

Instance Name vCPUs

Memory Local Storage

(NVMe SSD)

Random Read IOPS

(4 K Block)

Read Throughput

(128 K Block)

EBS-Optimized Bandwidth Network Bandwidth i3en.large 2 16 GiB 1 x 1.25 TB 42.5 K 325 MB/s Up to 3,500 Mbps Up to 25 Gbps i3en.xlarge 4 32 GiB 1 x 2.50 TB 85 K 650 MB/s Up to 3,500 Mbps Up to 25 Gbps i3en.2xlarge 8 64 GiB 2 x 2.50 TB 170 K 1.3 GB/s Up to 3,500 Mbps Up to 25 Gbps i3en.3xlarge 12 96 GiB 1 x 7.5 TB 250 K 2 GB/s Up to 3,500 Mbps Up to 25 Gbps i3en.6xlarge 24 192 GiB 2 x 7.5 TB 500 K 4 GB/s 3,500 Mbps 25 Gbps i3en.12xlarge 48 384 GiB 4 x 7.5 TB 1 M 8 GB/s 7,000 Mbps 50 Gbps i3en.24xlarge 96 768 GiB 8 x 7.5 TB 2 M 16 GB/s 14,000 Mbps 100 Gbps

In comparison to the I3 instances, the I3en instances offer:

A cost per GB of SSD instance storage that is up to 50% lower

Storage density (GB per vCPU) that is roughly 2.6x greater

Ratio of network bandwidth to vCPUs that is up to 2.7x greater

You will need HVM AMIs with the NVMe 1.0e and ENA drivers. You can also make use of the new Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) if you are using the i3en.24xlarge (read my recent post to learn more).

Now Available

You can launch I3en instances today in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) Regions in On-Demand and Spot form. Reserved Instances, Dedicated Instances, and Dedicated Hosts are available.

— Jeff;