Amazon announced today that it has teamed with Intel to create a new class of Elastic Compute Cloud instances built for high-performance workloads. Named C4, the new instances are powered by a custom-built Intel processor built on the Haswell architecture.
People looking to run general purpose workloads will probably want to pass on the new instances when they go live, but those developers who need massive amounts of performance at their disposal can turn to the C4 line. The highest performance option available is the C4.8xlarge, with 36 virtual CPUs, 60 GiB (roughly 60 GB) of RAM and a 10 Gbps network connection.
Here’s a breakdown of all the instances available:
In addition to the new high-performance instances, developers will also have access to higher performance tiers in Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage service. SSD-powered General Purpose EBS volumes can now store up to 16 TB of data, with up to 10,000 input/output operations per second. That’s a hefty increase from a cap of 1 TB of storage with 3,000 IOPS.
People who need even more power will be able to turn to the recently-updated Provisioned Storage service, which supports up to 16 TB of SSD-backed storage with up to 20,000 provisioned IOPS.
Of course, tapping into that sort of performance will come with quite a cost. Amazon hasn’t revealed pricing for the C4 instances yet, but it’s safe to say that developers with a need for speed will have to pay for it. General purpose EBS volumes cost 10 cents per gigabyte provisioned every month. Provisioned Storage costs 12.5 cents per gigabyte-month, plus 6.5 cents per provisioned IOPS per month.
The new instances and storage are in direct competition with new high-performance products unveiled by Microsoft and Google over the past month for Azure and Google Cloud Platform, respectively.
