M5, M5d, R5m, R5d, and z1d Now Available
After announcing them months prior, Amazon is officially launching 5 new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. These instances carry the following specs:
- AWS-Custom Intel Xeon Scalable Processor (Skylake) – All instances
- Sustained All-Core Turbo – Up to 3.1 GHz, 4.0 for z1d.metal
- Logical Processors – 96 for m5, m5d, r5 and r5d instance types, and 48 for z1d
- Memory – 384 Gig, with 768 Gig for r5 and r5d.
- Local Storage – 4 x900 Gb NVMe SSD for m5d, r5d, and z1d
- EBS-Optimized Bandwidth — 14 Gbps
- Network Bandwidth – 25 Gbps
Applications
Bare metal instances are excellent for applications that need access to low-level processor features, like performance counters.
M5 instances are best used for common workloads. Examples include web and application servers, gaming servers, app dev environments, and so on.
R5 are for powering more memory-intensive programs. High-performance databases, web-scale in-memory caches, real-time large-scale data analytics, and so on.
The high compute abilities and memory of the z1d instances make them useful for relational databases with expensive licensing costs for each core, or for electronic design automation.
You may try these applications starting today. Availability is still limited, with most bare metal instances available in US East (North Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe, (Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, and Stockholm) and Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, and Sydney).
r5d.metal is also available in AWS GovCloud (US-West).
z1d.metal is available in US East (North Virginia), US West (North California and Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore and Tokyo). Watch out for more AWS regions, coming soon!
Marco is a managing partner at copebit. He got seven AWS certifications. He has spent three years in Australia and has worked with AWS and DevOps technologies for the last 6 years.