Amazon announced the launch of new M4 instances for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). These are the next generation of general purpose instances, and make use of custom 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 Haswell processors, and offer dedicated bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).
The instances provide Enhanced Networking for higher packet per second performance, lower network jitter, and lower network latencies, according to the company. They also deliver up to four times the packet rate of instances without Enhanced Networking.
“Within Placement Groups, Enhanced Networking reduces average latencies between instances by 50 percent or more,” Amazon says. “M4 instances are well-suited for a wide variety of applications including relational and in-memory databases, gaming servers, caching fleets, batch processing, and business applications like SAP and Microsoft SharePoint.”
“Amazon EC2 provides a comprehensive selection of instances to support virtually any workload, and we continue to deliver new technologies and high performance in our current generation instances,” says Matt Garman, Vice President, Amazon EC2, AWS. “M4 instances bring new capabilities to the General Purpose family through the use of a custom Intel Haswell processor and larger instance sizes. We are also pleased to deliver even better network performance with dedicated bandwidth to Amazon EBS and Enhanced Networking, an Amazon EC2 feature that we are providing, for the first time, to General Purpose Instances. With these capabilities, M4 is one of our most powerful instance types and a terrific choice for workloads requiring a balance of compute, memory, and network resources.”
You can launch M4 instances using AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, and third-party libraries. There are five different sizes:
More details on the AWS blog.
In other AWS news, Redshift is getting more cost-effective.
Image via Amazon
