At AWS Re:Invent the cloud computing behemoth announced a public preview of its i3.metal instances. That is right, AWS is now allowing access to bare metal instances. Although the company has focused on making its hypervisor offerings faster by ditching Xen in favor of KVM on its new EC2 c5 instances, there are customers that simply want more performance. For those users, AWS is giving a lower level of access to its new i3.metal offering.
Amazon AWS Bare Metal Instances
Here is a bit on the new Amazon AWS EC2 Bare Metal instances:
New Bare Metal Instances
Today we are launching a public preview the i3.metal instance, the first in a series of EC2 instances that offer the best of both worlds, allowing the operating system to run directly on the underlying hardware while still providing access to all of the benefits of the cloud. The instance gives you direct access to the processor and other hardware, and has the following specifications:
- Processing – Two Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 processors running at 2.3 GHz, with a total of 36 hyperthreaded cores (72 logical processors).
- Memory – 512 GiB.
- Storage – 15.2 terabytes of local, SSD-based NVMe storage.
- Network – 25 Gbps of ENA-based enhanced networking.
(Source: AWS)
This is certainly a great step to allow full performance of previous generation hardware now. In the future, we fully expect Intel and perhaps AMD EPYC based cloud offerings from AWS. It is great to see that AWS EC2 is focused on performance since that has been a major concern in the past.
Currently to access the feature, one does have to sign-up for access here. We are excited to see how this changes the market for bare metal servers. For traditional dedicated hosting providers, the bare metal instance AWS is offering is storage, CPU and memory heavy and networking light, but it will likely consume a portion of the higher-end dedicated hosting market.
