High Storage Instances Come to Amazon EC2

Michael Garrity — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 21:09:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) wanted to give its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) users a present, and what better way to celebrate the holidays than with family – a new instance family, that is.

The cloud computing services provider from Amazon recently announced High Storage instances for EC2. This additional instance family is optimized for applications that required rapid access to large amounts of data, while also providing AWS customers with 35 EC2 Compute Units of computing capacity, 117 GiB of RAM and 48 TB of storage across 24 hard disk drives. Moreover, these instances are capable of delivering more than 2.4 GB of sequential I/O performance per second.

In other words, because High Storage instances provide such massive amounts of direct attached storage per instance, they are ideal for data-intensive applications like Hadoop workloads, log processing, data warehousing and parallel file systems for processing and analyzing large datasets in the AWS cloud.

High Storage instances follow eight other EC2 instance families, including Cluster Compute and High I/O instances, to help meet the evolving application requirements of Amazon EC2 customers. Like the others, High Storage instances were designed to enhance the performance and efficiency of even the most demanding applications. They also power the new petabyte-scale data warehousing service Amazon Redshift and can help Amazon Elastic MapReduce customers process larger quantities of data more resourcefully, who helps significantly lower costs.

AWS customers can immediately launch High Storage instances through the AWS Management Console, Amazon EC2 and Elastic MapReduce Command Line Interfaces, AWS SDKs and various other third-party libraries. However, at the moment this new instance family is only available in the US East Region; they will be made available in other AWS Regions “in the coming months.”

Spot Instances in Amazon EC2

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:42:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services announced Spot Instances, a new option for purchasing and consuming Amazon EC2 compute resources. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

Spot Instances enables customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current "Spot Price" - which changes periodically based on supply and demand. Customers whose bids exceed it gain access to the available Spot Instances.

According to the release: "Spot Instances are well-suited for applications that can have flexible start and stop times such as image and video conversion and rendering, data processing, financial modeling and analysis, web crawling and load testing. By being flexible on when their instances run, coupled with the ability to bid what they’re willing to pay for capacity, customers can significantly lower their Amazon EC2 costs."

"As customers continued to expand their use of AWS, they started asking if additional pools of capacity were available, even if only for a few hours at a time. Some customers were looking to reduce costs in exchange for being flexible as to when they run their application; others told us they were willing to pay more when they had urgent, high volume needs,” said Peter De Santis, General Manger of Amazon EC2. “Because of the dynamic nature of supply and demand in the Amazon EC2 environment, we developed Spot Instances to let customers take advantage of our unused capacity while specifying a price they are willing to pay."

Stay up to date on the latest Internet trends:
Request a professional subscription to Website Magazine,
the most popular print publication on Web success.

'Net Features : amazon ec2

High Storage Instances Come to Amazon EC2

Spot Instances in Amazon EC2