Amazon EC2 FAQs

Q: What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)?

Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Q: What can I do with Amazon EC2?

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud.  The Amazon EC2 simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

Q: How can I get started with Amazon EC2?

To sign up for Amazon EC2, select the “Sign up for This Web Service” button on the Amazon EC2 detail page. You must have an AWS account to access this service; if you do not already have one, you will be prompted to create one when you begin the Amazon EC2 signup process. After signing up, please refer to the Amazon EC2 documentation, which includes our Getting Started Guide.

Q: Why am I asked to verify my phone number when signing up for Amazon EC2?

Amazon EC2 registration requires you to have a valid phone number and email address on file with AWS in case we ever need to contact you. Verifying your phone number takes only a couple of minutes and involves receiving a phone call during the registration process and entering a PIN using the phone key pad.

Q: What can developers now do that they could not before?

Until now, small developers did not have the capital to acquire massive compute resources and ensure they had the capacity they needed to handle unexpected spikes in load. Amazon EC2 helps developers use Amazon’s own benefits of massive scale with no upfront investment or performance compromises. Developers are now free to innovate knowing that no matter how successful their businesses become, it will be inexpensive and simple to ensure they have the compute capacity they need to meet their business requirements.

The “Elastic” nature of the service allows developers to instantly scale to meet spikes in traffic or demand. When computing requirements unexpectedly change (up or down), Amazon EC2 can instantly respond, meaning that developers have the ability to control how many resources are in use at any given point in time. In contrast, traditional hosting services generally provide a fixed number of resources for a fixed amount of time, meaning that users have a limited ability to easily respond when their usage is rapidly changing, unpredictable, or is known to experience large peaks at various intervals.

Q: How do I run systems in the Amazon EC2 environment?

Once you have set up your account and select or create your AMIs, you are ready to boot your instance. You can start your AMI on any number of On-Demand instances by using the RunInstances API call. You simply need to indicate how many instances you wish to launch. If you wish to run more than your On-Demand quota, complete the Amazon EC2 instance request form.

If Amazon EC2 is able to fulfill your request, RunInstances will return success, and we will start launching your instances. You can check on the status of your instances using the DescribeInstances API call. You can also programmatically terminate any number of your instances using the TerminateInstances API call.

If you have a running instance using an Amazon EBS boot partition, you can also use the StopInstances API call to release the compute resources but preserve the data on the boot partition. You can use the StartInstances API when you are ready to restart the associated instance with the Amazon EBS boot partition.

In addition, you have the option to use Spot Instances to reduce your computing costs when you have flexibility in when your applications can run. Read more about Spot Instances for a more detailed explanation on how Spot Instances work.

If you prefer, you can also perform all these actions from the AWS Management Console or through the command line using our command line tools, which have been implemented with this web service API.

Q: What is the difference between using the local instance store and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for the root device?

When you launch your Amazon EC2 instances you have the ability to store your root device data on Amazon EBS or the local instance store. By using Amazon EBS, data on the root device will persist independently from the lifetime of the instance. This enables you to stop and restart the instance at a subsequent time, which is similar to shutting down your laptop and restarting it when you need it again.

Alternatively, the local instance store only persists during the life of the instance. This is an inexpensive way to launch instances where data is not stored to the root device. For example, some customers use this option to run large web sites where each instance is a clone to handle web traffic.

Q: How quickly will systems be running?

It typically takes less than 10 minutes from the issue of the RunInstances call to the point where all requested instances begin their boot sequences. This time depends on a number of factors including: the size of your AMI, the number of instances you are launching, and how recently you have launched that AMI. Images launched for the first time may take slightly longer to boot.  

Q: How do I load and store my systems with Amazon EC2?

Amazon EC2 allows you to set up and configure everything about your instances from your operating system up to your applications. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is simply a packaged-up environment that includes all the necessary bits to set up and boot your instance. Your AMIs are your unit of deployment. You might have just one AMI or you might compose your system out of several building block AMIs (e.g., webservers, appservers, and databases). Amazon EC2 provides a number of tools to make creating an AMI easy. Once you create a custom AMI, you will need to bundle it. If you are bundling an image with a root device backed by Amazon EBS, you can simply use the bundle command in the AWS Management Console. If you are bundling an image with a boot partition on the instance store, then you will need to use the AMI Tools to upload it to Amazon S3. Amazon EC2 uses Amazon EBS and Amazon S3 to provide reliable, scalable storage of your AMIs so that we can boot them when you ask us to do so.

Or, if you want, you don’t have to set up your own AMI from scratch. You can choose from a number of globally available AMIs that provide useful instances. For example, if you just want a simple Linux server, you can choose one of the standard Linux distribution AMIs.

Q: How do I access my systems?

The RunInstances call that initiates execution of your application stack will return a set of DNS names, one for each system that is being booted. This name can be used to access the system exactly as you would if it were in your own data center. You own that machine while your operating system stack is executing on it.

Q: Is Amazon EC2 used in conjunction with Amazon S3?

Yes, Amazon EC2 is used jointly with Amazon S3 for instances with root devices backed by local instance storage. By using Amazon S3, developers have access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. In order to execute systems in the Amazon EC2 environment, developers use the tools provided to load their AMIs into Amazon S3 and to move them between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2. See How do I load and store my systems with Amazon EC2? for more information about AMIs.

We expect developers to find the combination of Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 to be very useful. Amazon EC2 provides cheap, scalable compute in the cloud while Amazon S3 allows users to store their data reliably.

Q: How many instances can I run in Amazon EC2?

You are limited to running On-Demand Instances per your vCPU-based On-Demand Instance limit, purchasing 20 Reserved Instances, and requesting Spot Instances per your dynamic Spot limit per region. New AWS accounts may start with limits that are lower than the limits described here.

If you need more instances, complete the Amazon EC2 limit increase request form with your use case, and your limit increase will be considered. Limit increases are tied to the region they were requested for.

Q: Are there any limitations in sending email from Amazon EC2 instances?

Yes. In order to maintain the quality of Amazon EC2 addresses for sending email, we enforce default limits on the amount of email that can be sent from EC2 accounts. If you wish to send larger amounts of email from EC2, you can apply to have these limits removed from your account by filling out this form.

Q: How quickly can I scale my capacity both up and down?

Amazon EC2 provides a truly elastic computing environment. Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. When you need more instances, you simply call RunInstances, and Amazon EC2 will typically set up your new instances in a matter of minutes. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.

Q: What operating system environments are supported?

Amazon EC2 currently supports a variety of operating systems including: Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, openSUSE Leap, Fedora, Fedora CoreOS, Debian, CentOS, Gentoo Linux, Oracle Linux, and FreeBSD. We are looking for ways to expand it to other platforms.

Q: Does Amazon EC2 use ECC memory?

In our experience, ECC memory is necessary for server infrastructure, and all the hardware underlying Amazon EC2 uses ECC memory.

Q: How is this service different than a plain hosting service?

Traditional hosting services generally provide a pre-configured resource for a fixed amount of time and at a predetermined cost. Amazon EC2 differs fundamentally in the flexibility, control and significant cost savings it offers developers, allowing them to treat Amazon EC2 as their own personal data center with the benefit of Amazon.com’s robust infrastructure.

When computing requirements unexpectedly change (up or down), Amazon EC2 can instantly respond, meaning that developers have the ability to control how many resources are in use at any given point in time. In contrast, traditional hosting services generally provide a fixed number of resources for a fixed amount of time, meaning that users have a limited ability to easily respond when their usage is rapidly changing, unpredictable, or is known to experience large peaks at various intervals.

Secondly, many hosting services don’t provide full control over the compute resources being provided. Using Amazon EC2, developers can choose not only to initiate or shut down instances at any time, they can completely customize the configuration of their instances to suit their needs – and change it at any time. Most hosting services cater more towards groups of users with similar system requirements, and so offer limited ability to change these.

Finally, with Amazon EC2 developers enjoy the benefit of paying only for their actual resource consumption – and at very low rates. Most hosting services require users to pay a fixed, upfront fee irrespective of their actual computing power used, and so users risk overbuying resources to compensate for the inability to quickly scale up resources within a short time frame. 

Q: What is changing?

Amazon EC2 is transitioning On-Demand Instance limits from the current instance count-based limits to the new vCPU-based limits to simplify the limit management experience for AWS customers. Usage toward the vCPU-based limit is measured in terms of number of vCPUs (virtual central processing units) for the Amazon EC2 Instance Types to launch any combination of instance types that meet your application needs.

Q: What are vCPU-based limits?

You are limited to running one or more On-Demand Instances in an AWS account, and Amazon EC2 measures usage towards each limit based on the total number of vCPUs (virtual central processing unit) that are assigned to the running On-Demand instances in your AWS account. The following table shows the number of vCPUs for each instance size. The vCPU mapping for some instance types may differ; see Amazon EC2 Instance Types for details.

Q: How many On-Demand Instances can I run in Amazon EC2?

There are five vCPU-based instance limits; each defines the amount of capacity you can use of a given instance family. All usage of instances in a given family, regardless of generation, size, or configuration variant (e.g. disk, processor type), will accrue towards the family’s total vCPU limit, listed in the table below. New AWS accounts may start with limits that are lower than the limits described here.

Q: Are these On-Demand Instance vCPU-based limits regional?

Yes, the On-Demand Instance limits for an AWS account are set on a per-region basis.

Q: Will these limits change over time?

Yes, limits can change over time. Amazon EC2 is constantly monitoring your usage within each region and your limits are raised automatically based on your use of EC2.

Q: How can I request a limit increase?

Even though EC2 automatically increases your On-Demand Instance limits based on your usage, if needed you can request a limit increase from the Amazon EC2 service page on the Service Quotas console, or the Service Quotas API/CLI.

Q: How can I calculate my new vCPU limit?

You can find the vCPU mapping for each of the Amazon EC2 Instance Types.

Q: Do vCPU limits apply when purchasing Reserved Instances or requesting Spot Instances?

No, the vCPU-based limits only apply to running On-Demand instances and Spot Instances.

Q: How can I view my current On-Demand Instance limits?

You can find your current On-Demand Instance limits from the Service Quotas console and APIs.

Q: Will this affect running instances?

No, opting into vCPU-based limits will not affect any running instances.

Q: Can I still launch the same number of instances?

Yes, the vCPU-based instance limits allow you to launch at least the same number of instances as count-based instance limits.

Q: Will I be able to view instance usage against these limits?

With the Amazon CloudWatch metrics integration, you can view EC2 usage against limits in the Service Quotas console. Service Quotas also enables customers to use CloudWatch for configuring alarms to warn customers of approaching limits. In addition, you can continue to track and inspect your instance usage in Trusted Advisor and Limit Monitor.

Q: Will I still be able to use the DescribeAccountAttributes API?

With the vCPU limits, we no longer have total instance limits governing the usage. Hence the DescribeAccountAttributes API will no longer return the max-instances value. Instead you can now use the Service Quotas APIs to retrieve information about EC2 limits. You can find more information about the Service Quotas APIs in the AWS documentation.

Q: Will the vCPU limits have an impact on my monthly bill?

No. EC2 usage is still calculated either by the hour or the second, depending on which AMI you're running and the instance type and size you’ve launched.

Q: Will vCPU limits be available in all Regions?

vCPU-based instance limits are available in all commercial AWS Regions.

Q: What is changing?

As of Januaury 7, 2020, Amazon EC2 began rolling out a change to restrict email traffic over port 25 by default to protect customers and other recipients from spam and email abuse. Port 25 is typically used as the default SMTP port to send emails. AWS accounts that have requested and had Port 25 throttles removed in the past will not be impacted by this change.

Q: I have a valid use case for sending emails to port 25 from EC2. How can I have these port 25 restrictions removed?

If you have a valid use case for sending emails to port 25 (SMTP) from EC2, please submit a Request to Remove Email Sending Limitations to have these restrictions lifted. You can alternately send emails using a different port, or leverage an existing authenticated email relay service such as Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES).

Q: What does your Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement guarantee?

Our SLA guarantees a Monthly Uptime Percentage of at least 99.99% for Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS within a Region.

Q: How do I know if I qualify for an SLA Service Credit?

You are eligible for an SLA credit for either Amazon EC2 or Amazon EBS (whichever was Unavailable, or both if both were Unavailable) if the Region that you are operating in has an Monthly Uptime Percentage of less than 99.99% during any monthly billing cycle. For full details on all of the terms and conditions of the SLA, as well as details on how to submit a claim, see the Amazon Compute Service Level Agreement.

Q: What are Accelerated Computing instances?

The Accelerated Computing instance category includes instance families that use hardware accelerators, or co-processors, to perform some functions, such as floating-point number calculation and graphics processing, more efficiently than is possible in software running on CPUs. Amazon EC2 provides a broad choice of accelerators including GPUs, purpose built AI chips AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia, FPGAs and more.

Q: What are EC2 UltraServers?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) UltraServers are ideal for customers seeking the highest AI training and inference performance for models at the trillion-parameter scale. UltraServers connect multiple EC2 instances using a dedicated, high-bandwidth, low-latency accelerator interconnect, allowing you to leverage a tightly-coupled mesh of accelerators across EC2 instances and access significantly more compute and memory than standalone EC2 instances.

Q: When should I use GPU-based EC2 instances?don’t need to write out the full service name since it’s already written out on first instance in the General section of the FAQs?

GPU instances work best for applications with massive parallelism such as generative AI, deep learning, graphics, gaming, and spatial computing. If you have deep learning and AI models that need third-party proprietary libraries or languages, for example NVIDIA CUDA, CUDA Deep Neural Network (cuDNN), or TensorRT libraries, we recommend using the NVIDIA GPU-based instances.

Q: When should I use G-series vs P-series of GPU-based EC2 instances?

Our G-series of instances is well suited for graphics, gaming and spatial computing as well as AI/ML inference and single-node AI/ML training workloads. Our P-series of instances are optimized for AI inference and training of large foundation models.

Q. When should I use AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia powered instances?

AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia are purpose built for deep learning and generative AI workloads. You can use these instances for AI training and inference to get high performance while saving up to 50% on training and inference costs over comparable EC2 instances. AWS Neuron SDK supports a diverse set of model architectures on these instances and you can learn more by visiting the Neuron Documentation page.

Q: Where do I get NVIDIA drivers, libraries, frameworks, and development tools for P-series and G-series instances?

There are listings on the AWS Marketplace that offer Amazon Linux AMIs and Windows Server AMIs with the NVIDIA drivers pre-installed. You may also launch 64-bit HVM AMIs and install the drivers yourself. You must visit the NVIDIA driver website and search for the right drivers based on what GPUs are featured in the instance you are using.

You also have the option to use NVIDIA AI enterprise which includes NVIDIA development tools, frameworks, and pre-trained models for AI practitioners, and reliable management and orchestration for IT professionals to ensure performance, high availability, and security. 

Q: What are Amazon EC2 UltraClusters?

Amazon EC2 UltraClusters can help you scale to thousands of GPUs or purpose-built ML chips, such as AWS Trainium, to get on-demand access to a supercomputer. They democratize access to supercomputing-class performance for machine learning (ML), generative AI, and high-performance computing (HPC) developers through a simple pay-as-you-go usage model without any setup or maintenance costs. For more information, visit the EC2 UltraClusters page. 

Flex instances

Q: How do Amazon EC2 Flex instances (M7i-flex and C7i-flex) differentiate from comparable instances (M7i and C7i)? When should I use Flex instances over comparable instances?

Flex instances (M7i-flex and C7i-flex) are lower priced variants of comparable instances (M7i and C7i) and offer 19% better price performance compared to the previous generation of instances (M6i and C6i). Flex instances can be used to run a majority of workloads that benefit from the latest generation performance but do not fully utilize compute resources. These instances are designed to deliver a baseline CPU performance with the ability to scale up to the full CPU performance 95% of the time. Flex instances are ideal for workloads that fit on instance sizes up to 16xlarge (up to 64 vCPUs and up to 256 GB), including web and application servers, databases, virtual desktops, batch processing, microservices, caches, enterprise applications, Apache Kafka, and Elasticsearch. You can use comparable instances (M7i and C7i) for workloads that need the largest instance sizes or high sustained CPU, network, or EBS performance, such as large application servers and databases, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, CPU-based machine learning (ML), video encoding and streaming, batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), and ad serving.

Q: What performance do Flex instances provide?

Flex instances provide reliable CPU resources to deliver a baseline CPU performance of 40%, designed to meet the compute requirements of the majority of workloads. For times when workloads need more performance, Flex instances provide the ability to scale up to 100% CPU for 95% of the time over a 24-hour window.

Q: What are some other use cases for M7i-flex instances?

The M7i-flex instances provide a compelling upgrade path for workloads running on T3 larger-sized instances (large to 2xlarge) by offering better price performance, a fixed hourly price that includes baseline CPU and additional CPU usage beyond baseline, and larger instance sizes up to 8xlarge (32vCPUs and 128 GB). M7i-flex instances offer a simplified way to optimize your EC2 usage without CPU credits.

Burstable instances

Q: How are Burstable Performance Instances different?

Amazon EC2 allows you to choose between Fixed Performance Instances (e.g. C, M and R instance families) and Burstable Performance Instances (e.g. T2). Burstable Performance Instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline.

T2 instances’ baseline performance and ability to burst are governed by CPU Credits. Each T2 instance receives CPU Credits continuously, the rate of which depends on the instance size. T2 instances accrue CPU Credits when they are idle, and consume CPU credits when they are active. A CPU Credit provides the performance of a full CPU core for one minute. 

* For the t2.medium, single threaded applications can use 40% of 1 core, or if needed, multithreaded applications can use 20% each of 2 cores.

**For the t2.large, single threaded applications can use 60% of 1 core, or if needed, multithreaded applications can use 30% each of 2 cores.

*** For the t2.xlarge, single threaded applications can use 90% of 1 core, or if needed, multithreaded applications can use 45% each of 2 cores or 22.5% of all 4 cores.

**** For the t2.2xlarge, single threaded applications can use all of 1 core, or if needed, multithreaded applications can use 67.5% each of 2 cores or 16.875% of all 8 cores.

Q: How do I choose the right Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for my T2 instances?

You will want to verify that the minimum memory requirements of your operating system and applications are within the memory allocated for each T2 instance size (for example, 512 MiB for t2.nano). Operating systems with Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) that consume significant memory and CPU, for example Microsoft Windows, might need a t2.micro or larger instance size for many use cases. You can find AMIs suitable for the t2.nano instance types on AWS Marketplace. Windows customers who do not need the GUI can use the Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Core AMI.

Q: When should I choose a Burstable Performance Instance, such as T2?

T2 instances provide a cost-effective platform for a broad range of general purpose production workloads. T2 Unlimited instances can sustain high CPU performance for as long as required. If your workloads consistently require CPU usage much higher than the baseline, consider a dedicated CPU instances such as the M or C.

Q: How can I see the CPU Credit balance for each T2 instance?

You can see the CPU Credit balance for each T2 instance in EC2 per-Instance metrics in Amazon CloudWatch. T2 instances have four metrics, CPUCreditUsage, CPUCreditBalance, CPUSurplusCreditBalance and CPUSurplusCreditsCharged. CPUCreditUsage indicates the amount of CPU Credits used. CPUCreditBalance indicates the balance of CPU Credits. CPUSurplusCredit Balance indicates credits used for bursting in the absence of earned credits. CPUSurplusCreditsCharged indicates credits that are charged when average usage exceeds the baseline.

Q: What happens to CPU performance if my T2 instance is running low on credits (CPU Credit balance is near zero)?

If your T2 instance has a zero CPU Credit balance, performance will remain at baseline CPU performance. For example, the t2.micro provides baseline CPU performance of 10% of a physical CPU core. If your instance’s CPU Credit balance is approaching zero, CPU performance will be lowered to baseline performance over a 15-minute interval.

Q: Does my T2 instance credit balance persist at stop / start?

No, a stopped instance does not retain its previously earned credit balance.

Q: Can T2 instances be purchased as Reserved Instances or Spot Instances?

T2 instances can be purchased as On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances or Spot Instances.

Q: What are Amazon EC2 T4g instances?

Amazon EC2 T4g instances are the next-generation of general purpose burstable instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors. T4g instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances. They are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and Nitro hypervisor.

Q: What are some of the ideal use cases for T4g instances?

T4g instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances for a wide variety of burstable general purpose workloads such as micro-services, low-latency interactive applications, small and medium databases, virtual desktops, development environments, code repositories, and business-critical applications. Customers deploying applications built on open source software across T instances will find the T4g instances an appealing option to realize the best price performance. Arm developers can also build their applications directly on native Arm hardware as opposed to cross-compilation or emulation.

Q: How can customers get access to the T4g free trial?

Until December 31, 2025, all AWS customers will be enrolled automatically in the T4g free trial as detailed in the AWS Free Tier. During the free-trial period, customers who run a t4g.small instance will automatically get 750 free hours per month deducted from their bill during each month. The 750 hours are calculated in aggregate across all Regions in which the t4g.small instances are used. Customers must pay for surplus CPU credits when they exceed the instances allocated credits during the 750 free hours of the T4g free trial program. For more information about how CPU credits work, see Key concepts and definitions for burstable performance instances in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.

Q: Who is eligible for the T4g free trial?

All existing and new customers with an AWS account can take advantage of the T4g free trial. The T4g free trial is available for a limited time until December 31, 2025. The start and end time of the free trial are based on the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The T4g free trial will be available in addition to the existing AWS Free Tier on t2.micro/t3.micro. Customers who have exhausted their t2.micro (or t3.micro, depending on the Region) Free Tier usage can still benefit from the T4g free trial.

Q: What is the regional availability of T4g free trial?

The T4g free trial is currently available across these AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), and Europe (Stockholm). It is currently not available in the China (Beijing) and China (Ningxia) Regions.

As part of the free trial, customers can run t4g.small instances across one or multiple Regions from a single cumulative bucket of 750 free hours per month until December 31, 2025. For example, a customer can run t4g.small in Oregon for 300 hours for a month and run another t4g.small in Tokyo for 450 hours during the same month. This would add up to 750 hours per month of the free-trial limit.

Q: Is there an additional charge for running specific AMIs under the T4g free trial?

Under the t4g.small free trial, there will be no Amazon Machine Image (AMI) charge for Amazon Linux 2, RHEL and SUSE Linux AMIs that are available through the EC2 console Quick Start for the first 750 free hours per month. After 750 free hours per month, regular On-Demand prices, including AMI charge (if any), will apply. The applicable software fees for AWS Marketplace offers with AMI fulfillment options is not included in the free trial. Only the t4g.small infrastructure cost is included and covered under the free trial.

Q: How will the t4g.small free trial be reflected on my AWS bill?

The T4g free trial has a monthly billing cycle that starts on the first of every month and ends on the last day of that month. Under the T4g free-trial billing plan, customers using t4g.small will see a $0 line item on their bill under the On-Demand pricing plan for the first 750 aggregate hours of usage for every month during the free-trial period. Customers can start any time during the free-trial period and get 750 free hours for the remainder of that month. Any unused hours from the previous month will not be carried over. Customers can launch multiple t4g.small instances under the free trial. Customers will be notified automatically through email using AWS Budgets when their aggregate monthly usage reaches 85% of 750 free hours. When the aggregate instance usage exceeds 750 hours for the monthly billing cycle, customers will be charged based on regular On-Demand pricing for the exceeded hours for that month. For customers with a Compute Savings Plan or T4g Instance Savings Plan, Savings Plan (SV) discount will be applied to On-Demand pricing for hours exceeding the 750 free trial hours. If customers have purchased the T4g Reserved Instance (RI) plan, the RI plan applies first to any usage on an hourly basis. For any remaining usage after the RI plan has been applied, the free trial billing plan is in effect.

Q: If customers sign up for consolidated billing (or a single payer account), can they get the T4g free trial for each account that is tied to the payer account?

No, customers who use consolidated billing to consolidate payment across multiple accounts will have access to one free trial per Organization. Each payer account gets a total aggregate of 750 free hours a month. For more details about consolidated billing, see Consolidated billing for AWS Organizations in the AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide.

Q: Will customers get charged for surplus CPU credits as a part of T4g free trial?

Customers must pay for surplus CPU credits when they exceed the instances allocated credits during the 750 free hours of the T4g free trial program. For details about how CPU credits work, see Key concepts and definitions for burstable performance instances in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.

Q: At the end of the free trial, how will customers be billed for t4g.small instances?

Starting January 1, 2026, customers running on t4g.small instances will be automatically switched from the free trial plan to the On-Demand pricing plan (or Reserved Instance (RI)/Savings Plan (SV) plan, if purchased). Accumulated credits will be set to zero. Customers will receive an email notification seven days before the end of the free trial period stating that the free trial period will be ending in seven days. Starting January 1, 2026, if the RI plan is purchased, the RI plans will apply. Otherwise, customers will be charged regular On-Demand pricing for t4g.small instances. For customers who have the T4g Instance Savings Plan or a Compute Savings Plan, t4g.small instance billing will apply the Savings Plan discount on their On-Demand pricing.

Compute Optimized instances

Q: When should I use Compute Optimized instances?

Compute Optimized instances are designed for applications that benefit from high compute power. These applications include compute-intensive applications like high-performance web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), scientific modelling, distributed analytics and machine learning inference.

Q: What are Amazon EC2 C7g instances?

Amazon EC2 C7g instances, powered by the latest generation AWS Graviton3 processors, provide the best price performance in Amazon EC2 for compute-intensive workloads. C7g instances are ideal for high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, electronic design automation (EDA), gaming, video encoding, scientific modeling, distributed analytics, CPU-based machine learning (ML) inference, and ad-serving. They offer up to 25% better performance over the sixth generation AWS Graviton2-based C6g instances.

Q: What are Amazon EC2 C6g instances?

Amazon EC2 C6g instances are the next-generation of compute-optimized instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 Processors. C6g instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over C5 instances. They are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and Nitro hypervisor.

Q: What are some of the ideal use cases for C6g instances?

C6g instances deliver significant price performance benefits for compute-intensive workloads such as high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, ad serving, video encoding, gaming, scientific modelling, distributed analytics, and CPU-based machine learning inference. Customers deploying applications built on open source software across C instances family will find the C6g instances an appealing option to realize the best price performance. Arm developers can also build their applications directly on native Arm hardware as opposed to cross-compilation or emulation.

Q: What are the various storage options available on C6g instances?

C6g instances are EBS-optimized by default and offer up to 19,000 Mbps of dedicated EBS bandwidth to both encrypted and unencrypted EBS volumes. C6g instances only support Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) interface to access EBS storage volumes. Additionally, options with local NVMe instance storage are also available through the C6gd instance types.

Q: Which network interface is supported on C6g instances?

C6g instances support ENA based Enhanced Networking. With ENA, C6g instances can deliver up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth between instances when launched within a Placement Group.

Q: Will customers need to modify their applications and workloads to be able to run on the C6g instances?

The changes required are dependent on the application. Customers running applications built on open source software will find that the Arm ecosystem is well developed and already likely supports their applications. Most Linux distributions as well as containers (Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECR) support the Arm architecture. Customers will find Arm versions of commonly used software packages available for installation through the same mechanisms that they currently use. Applications that are based on interpreted languages (such as Java, Node, Python) not reliant on native CPU instruction sets should run with minimal to no changes. Applications developed using compiled languages (C, C++, GoLang) will need to be re-compiled to generate Arm binaries. The Arm architecture is well supported in these popular programming languages and modern code usually requires a simple ‘Make’ command. Refer to the Getting Started guide on GitHub for more details.

Q: Will there be more compute choices offered with the C6 instance families?

Yes, we plan to offer Intel and AMD CPU powered instances in the future as part of the C6 instance families.

Q: Can I launch C4 instances as Amazon EBS-optimized instances?

Each C4 instance type is EBS-optimized by default. C4 instances 500 Mbps to 4,000 Mbps to EBS above and beyond the general-purpose network throughput provided to the instance. Since this feature is always enabled on C4 instances, launching a C4 instance explicitly as EBS-optimized will not affect the instance's behavior.

Q: How can I use the processor state control feature available on the c4.8xlarge instance?

The c4.8xlarge instance type provides the ability for an operating system to control processor C-states and P-states. This feature is currently available only on Linux instances. You may want to change C-state or P-state settings to increase processor performance consistency, reduce latency, or tune your instance for a specific workload. By default, Amazon Linux provides the highest-performance configuration that is optimal for most customer workloads; however, if your application would benefit from lower latency at the cost of higher single- or dual-core frequencies, or from lower-frequency sustained performance as opposed to bursty Turbo Boost frequencies, then you should consider experimenting with the C-state or P-state configuration options that are available to these instances. For additional information on this feature, see the Amazon EC2 User Guide section on Processor State Control.

Q: Which instances are available within Compute Optimized instances category?

C6g instances: Amazon EC2 C6g instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors. They deliver up to 40% better price performance over C5 instances and are ideal for running advanced compute-intensive workloads. This includes workloads such as high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, ad serving, video encoding, gaming, scientific modelling, distributed analytics, and CPU-based machine learning inference. 

C6a instances: C6a instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz, offer up to 15% better price performance over C5a instances for a wide variety of workloads, and support always-on memory encryption using AMD Transparent Single Key Memory Encryption (TSME). C6a instances provide new instance sizes with up to 192 vCPUs and 384 GiB of memory, double that of the largest C5a instance. C6a also gives customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, more than twice that of C5a instances.

C6i instances: C6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better price performance over C5 instances for a wide variety of workloads, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory encryption (TME). C6i instances provide a new instance size (c6i.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 256 GiB of memory, 33% more than the largest C5 instance. They also provide up to 9% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU compared to C5 instances. C6i also give customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, twice that of C5 instances. C6i are also available with local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage (C6id instances) for applications that need high-speed, low-latency local storage. Compared to previous generation C5d instances, C6id instances offer up to 138% higher TB storage per vCPU and 56% lower cost per TB.

C5 instances: C5 instances are based on Intel Xeon Platinum processors, part of the Intel Xeon Scalable (codenamed Skylake-SP or Cascade Lake) processor family, are available in 9 sizes, and offer up to 96 vCPUs and 192 GiB memory. C5 instances deliver 25% improvement in price/performance compared to C4 instances. The C5d instances have local NVMe storage for workloads that require very low latency and storage access with high random read and write IOPS ability.

C5a instances: C5a instances deliver leading x86 price-performance for a broad set of compute-intensive workloads including batch processing, distributed analytics, data transformations, log analysis, and web applications. C5a instances feature 2nd Gen 3.3GHz AMD EPYC processors with up to 96 vCPUs and up to 192 GiB of memory. The C5ad instances have local NVMe storage for workloads that require very low latency and storage access with high random read and write IOPS ability.

C5n instances: C5n instances are ideal for applications requiring high network bandwidth and packet rate. The C5n instances are ideal for applications like HPC, data lakes, network appliances as well as applications that require inter-node communication and the Message Passing Interface (MPI). C5n offer a choice of Intel Xeon Platinum 3.0 GHz processors with up to 72 vCPUs and 192GiB of Memory.

C4 instances: C4 instances are based on Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (codenamed Haswell) processors. C4 instances are available in 5 sizes and offer up to 36 vCPUs and 60 GiB memory.

Q: Why should customers choose C6i instances over C5 instances?

C6i instances offer up to 15% better price performance over C5 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory encryption (TME). C6i instances provide a new instance size (c6i.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 256 GiB of memory, 33% more than the largest C5 instance. They also provide up to 9% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU compared to C5 instances. C6i also give customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, twice that of C5 instances.

Q: Why should customers choose C5 instances over C4 instances?

The generational improvement in CPU performance and lower price of C5 instances, which combined result in a 25% price/performance improvement relative to C4 instances, benefit a broad spectrum of workloads that currently run on C3 or C4 instances. For floating point intensive applications, Intel AVX-512 enables significant improvements in delivered TFLOPS by effectively extracting data level parallelism. Customers looking for absolute performance for graphics rendering and HPC workloads that can be accelerated with GPUs or FPGAs should also evaluate other instance families in the Amazon EC2 portfolio that include those resources to find the ideal instance for their workload.

Q: Which storage interface is supported on C5 instances?

C5 instances will support only NVMe EBS device model. EBS volumes attached to C5 instances will appear as NVMe devices. NVMe is a modern storage interface that provides latency reduction and results in increased disk I/O and throughput.

Q: Why does the total memory reported by the operating system not exactly match the advertised memory on instance types?

Portions of the EC2 instance memory are reserved and used by the virtual BIOS for video RAM, DMI, and ACPI. In addition, for instances that are powered by the AWS Nitro Hypervisor, a small percentage of the instance memory is reserved by the Amazon EC2 Nitro Hypervisor to manage virtualization.

High Performance Computing Optimized instances

Q: Which instances are available within the high performance computing (HPC) instances category?

Hpc7g instances: Hpc7g instances enable the best price performance for HPC workloads on AWS. They deliver up to 70% better performance and almost 3x better price performance compared to previous-generation AWS Graviton-based instances for compute-intensive HPC workloads. Hpc7g instances are powered by AWS Graviton 3E processors and provide up to 35% higher vector instruction performance compared to existing AWS Graviton3 instances. These instances provide up to 2x better floating-point performance compared to instances powered by Graviton2 processors. Hpc7g instances are built on the AWS Nitro System and provide 200 Gbps network bandwidth for low-latency internode communication for tightly coupled workloads that require highly parallelized, clustered compute resources.

Hpc7a instances: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Hpc7a instances, powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors, deliver up to 2.5x better performance compared to Amazon EC2 Hpc6a instances. Hpc7a instances feature 2x higher core density (up to 192 cores), 2.1x higher memory bandwidth throughput (up to 768 GB of memory), and 3x higher network bandwidth compared to Hpc6a instances. These instances offer 300 Gbps of Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) network bandwidth, powered by the AWS Nitro System, for fast and low latency inter-node communications.

Hpc6id instances: Hpc6id instances are powered by 64 cores of Intel 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors that run at frequencies up to 3.5 GHz for increased efficiency. These instances are designed to improve performance for memory-bound workloads by offering 5 GB/s memory bandwidth per vCPU. Hpc6id instances offer 200 Gbps EFA networking for high-throughput internode communications to help you run your HPC workloads at scale.

Hpc6a instances: Hpc6a instances are powered by 96 cores of 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz and 384 GiB RAM. Hpc6a instances offer 100 Gbps EFA networking enabled for high throughput internode communications to help you run your HPC workloads at scale.

Q: How are Hpc7g instances different from other EC2 instances?

Hpc7g instances are optimized to deliver capabilities suited for compute-intensive HPC workloads. Hpc7g instances are based on Arm-based Graviton3E processors that provide up to 35% higher vector instruction performance compared to existing instances based on Graviton3 processors. These instances deliver 64 physical cores, 128 GiB memory, and 200 Gbps network bandwidth optimized for traffic between instances in the same VPC and support EFA for increased network performance. Hpc7g instances are available in single Availability Zone deployments, enabling workloads to achieve the low-latency network performance necessary for tightly coupled node-to-node communication for HPC applications.

Q: Which pricing models do Hpc7g instances support?

Hpc7g instances are available for purchase through the 1- and 3-year Amazon EC2 Instance Savings Plans, Compute Savings Plans, EC2 On-Demand Instances, and EC2 Reserved Instances.

Q: Which AMIs are supported on Hpc7g instances?

Hpc7g instances support Amazon EBS backed AMIs only.

Q: How are Hpc7a instances different from other EC2 instances?

HPC-optimized EC2 Hpc7a instances are ideal for applications that benefit from high-performance processors such as large, complex simulations including computational fluid dynamics (CFD), numerical weather prediction, and multiphysics simulations. Hpc7a instances are designed to help you run tightly coupled, x86-based HPC workloads with better performance. Hpc7a instances feature 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors with 2x higher core density (up to 192 cores), 2.1x higher memory bandwidth throughput (768 GB of memory), and 3x higher network bandwidth compared to Hpc6a instances. These instances offer 300 Gbpsof EFA network bandwidth, powered by the AWS Nitro System, for for fast and low latency internode communications.

Q: Which pricing models do Hpc7a instances support?

Hpc7a instances are available for purchase through the 1- and 3-year Amazon EC2 Instance Savings Plans, Compute Savings Plans, EC2 On-Demand Instances, and EC2 Reserved Instances.

Q: Which AMIs are supported on Hpc7a instances?

Hpc7a instances support Amazon Linux 2, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu 18.04 or later, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 or later, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3 or later, CentOS 7 or later, and FreeBSD 11.1 or later.

Q: Which pricing models do Hpc6id instances support?

Hpc6id instances are available for purchase through the 1-year and 3-year Amazon EC2 Instance Savings Plans, Compute Savings Plans, EC2 On-Demand Instances, and EC2 Reserved Instances.

Q: How are Hpc6id instances different from other EC2 instances?

Hpc6id instances are optimized to deliver capabilities suited for memory-bound, data-intensive HPC workloads. Hyperthreading is disabled to increase per-vCPU CPU throughput and up to 5 GB/s memory bandwidth per vCPU. These instances deliver 200 Gbps network bandwidth optimized for traffic between instances in the same virtual private cloud (VPC), and support EFA for increased network performance. To optimize Hpc6id instances networking for tightly coupled workloads, you can access EC2 Hpc6id instances in a single Availability Zone in each Region.

Q: Which AMIs are supported on Hpc6id instances?

Hpc6id supports Amazon Linux 2, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu 18.04 or later, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 or later, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 or later, CentOS 7 or later, Windows Server 2008 R2 or earlier, and FreeBSD 11.1 or later.

Q: Which AMIs are supported on Hpc6a instances?

Hpc6a instances support Amazon Linux 2, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu 18.04 or later, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 or later, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 or later, CentOS 7 or later, and FreeBSD 11.1 or later. These instances also support Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019.

Q: Which pricing models do Hpc6a instances support?

Hpc6a instances are available for purchase through 1-year and 3-year Standard Reserved Instances, Convertible Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and On-Demand Instances.

General Purpose instances

Q: What are Amazon EC2 M6g instances?

Amazon EC2 M6g instances are the next-generation of general-purpose instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 Processors. M6g instances deliver up to 40% better price/performance over M5 instances. They are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and Nitro hypervisor.

Q: What are the specifications of the new AWS Graviton2 Processors?

The AWS Graviton2 processors deliver up to 7x performance, 4x the number of compute cores, 2x larger caches, 5x faster memory, and 50% faster per core encryption performance than first generation AWS Graviton processors. Each core of the AWS Graviton2 processor is a single-threaded vCPU. These processors also offer always-on fully encrypted DRAM memory, hardware acceleration for compression workloads, dedicated engines per vCPU that double the floating-point performance for workloads such as video encoding, and instructions for int8/fp16 CPU-based machine learning inference acceleration. The CPUs are built utilizing 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS on the advanced 7 nm manufacturing technology.

Q: Is memory encryption supported by AWS Graviton2 processors?

AWS Graviton2 processors support always-on 256-bit memory encryption to further enhance security. Encryption keys are securely generated within the host system, do not leave the host system, and are irrecoverably destroyed when the host is rebooted or powered down. Memory encryption does not support integration with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) and customers cannot bring their own keys.

Q: What are some of the ideal use cases for M6g instances?

M6g instances deliver significant performance and price performance benefits for a broad spectrum of general-purpose workloads such as application servers, gaming servers, microservices, mid-size databases, and caching fleets. Customers deploying applications built on open source software across the M instances will find the M6g instances an appealing option to realize the best price performance. Arm developers can also build their applications directly on native Arm hardware as opposed to cross-compilation or emulation.

Q: What are the various storage options available on M6g instances?

M6g instances are EBS-optimized by default and offer up to 19,000 Mbps of dedicated EBS bandwidth to both encrypted and unencrypted EBS volumes. M6g instances only support Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) interface to access EBS storage volumes. Additionally, options with local NVMe instance storage are also available through the M6gd instance types.

Q: Which network interface is supported on M6g instances?

M6g instances support ENA based Enhanced Networking. With ENA, M6g instances can deliver up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth between instances when launched within a Placement Group.

Q: Will customers need to modify their applications and workloads to be able to run on the M6g instances?

The changes required are dependent on the application. Customers running applications built on open source software will find that the Arm ecosystem is well developed and already likely supports their applications. Most Linux distributions as well as containers (Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECR) support the Arm architecture. Customers will find Arm versions of commonly used software packages available for installation through the same mechanisms that they currently use. Applications that are based on interpreted languages (such as Java, Node, Python) not reliant on native CPU instruction sets should run with minimal to no changes. Applications developed using compiled languages (C, C++, GoLang) will need to be re-compiled to generate Arm binaries. The Arm architecture is well supported in these popular programming languages and modern code usually requires a simple ‘Make’ command. Refer to the Getting Started guide on GitHub for more details.

Q: What are Amazon EC2 A1 instances?

Amazon EC2 A1 instances are general purpose instances powered by the first-generation AWS Graviton Processors that are custom designed by AWS.

Q: What are the specifications of the first-generation AWS Graviton Processors? 

AWS Graviton processors are custom designed by AWS utilizing Amazon’s extensive expertise in building platform solutions for cloud applications running at scale. These processors are based on the 64-bit Arm instruction set and feature Arm Neoverse cores as well as custom silicon designed by AWS. The cores operate at a frequency of 2.3 GHz.

Q: When should I use A1 instances?

A1 instances deliver significant cost savings for scale-out workloads that can fit within the available memory footprint. A1 instances are ideal for scale-out applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, and data/log processing. These instances will also appeal to developers, enthusiasts, and educators across the Arm developer community.

Q: Will customers have to modify applications and workloads to be able to run on the A1 instances?

The changes required are dependent on the application. Applications based on interpreted or run-time compiled languages (e.g. Python, Java, PHP, Node.js) should run without modifications. Other applications may need to be recompiled and those that don't rely on x86 instructions will generally build with minimal to no changes.

Q: Which operating systems/AMIs are supported on A1 Instances?

The following AMIs are supported on A1 instances: Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 16.04.4 or newer, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.6 or newer, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 or newer. Additional AMI support for Fedora, Debian, NGINX Plus are also available through community AMIs and the AWS Marketplace. EBS backed HVM AMIs launched on A1 instances require NVMe and ENA drivers installed at instance launch.

Q: Are there specific AMI requirements to run on M6g and A1 instances?

You will need to use the “arm64” AMIs with the M6g and A1 instances. x86 AMIs are not compatible with M6g and A1 instances.

Q: When should customers use A1 instances versus the new M6g instances?

A1 instances continue to offer significant cost benefits for scale-out workloads that can run on multiple smaller cores and fit within the available memory footprint. The new M6g instances are a good fit for a broad spectrum of applications that require more compute, memory, networking resources and/or can benefit from scaling up across platform capabilities. M6g instances will deliver the best price-performance within the instance family for these applications. M6g supports up to 16xlarge instance size (A1 supports up to 4xlarge), 4GB of memory per vCPU (A1 supports 2GB memory per vCPU), and up to 25 Gbps of networking bandwidth (A1 supports up to 10 Gbps).

Q: What are the various storage options available to A1 customers?

A1 instances are EBS-optimized by default and offer up to 3,500 Mbps of dedicated EBS bandwidth to both encrypted and unencrypted EBS volumes. A1 instances only support Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) interface to access EBS storage volumes. A1 instances will not support the blkfront interface.

Q: Which network interface is supported on A1 instances?

A1 instances support ENA based Enhanced Networking. With ENA, A1 instances can deliver up to 10 Gbps of network bandwidth between instances when launched within a Placement Group.

Q: Do A1 instances support the AWS Nitro System?

Yes, A1 instances are powered by the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and Nitro hypervisor.

Q: Why should customers choose EC2 M5 Instances over EC2 M4 Instances?

Compared with EC2 M4 Instances, the new EC2 M5 Instances deliver customers greater compute and storage performance, larger instance sizes for less cost, consistency and security. The biggest benefit of EC2 M5 Instances is based on its usage of the latest generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Skylake-SP or Cascade Lake), which deliver up to 20% improvement in price/performance compared to M4. With AVX-512 support in M5 vs. the older AVX2 in M4, customers will gain 2x higher performance in workloads requiring floating point operations. M5 instances offer up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth and up to 10 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth to Amazon EBS. M5 instances also feature significantly higher networking and Amazon EBS performance on smaller instance sizes with EBS burst capability.

Q: Why should customers choose M6i instances over M5 instances?

Amazon M6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over M5 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). Amazon EC2 M6i instances are the first to use a lower-case “i” to indicate they are Intel-powered instances. M6i instances provide a new instance size (m6i.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 512 GiB of memory, 33% more than the largest M5 instance. They also provide up to 20% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU compared to M5 instances, allowing customers to efficiently perform real-time analysis for data-intensive AI/ML, gaming, and High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. M6i also give customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, twice that of M5 instances. M6i also allows customers to use Elastic Fabric Adapter on the 32xlarge size, enabling low latency and high scale inter-node communication. For optimal networking performance on these new instances, Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) driver update may be required. For more information on optimal ENA driver for M6i, see this article.

Q: How does support for Intel AVX-512 benefit customers who use the EC2 M5 family or the M6i family?

Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) is a set of new CPU instructions available on the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors, that can accelerate performance for workloads and usages such as scientific simulations, financial analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning/deep learning, 3D modeling and analysis, image and video processing, cryptography and data compression, among others. Intel AVX-512 offers exceptional processing of encryption algorithms, helping to reduce the performance overhead for cryptography, which means customers who use the EC2 M5 family or M6i family can deploy more secure data and services into distributed environments without compromising performance.

Q: What are M5zn instances?

M5zn instances are a variant of the M5 general purpose instances that are powered by the fastest Intel Xeon Scalable processor in the cloud, with an all-core turbo frequency of up to 4.5 GHz, along with 100 Gbps networking and support for Amazon EFA. M5zn instances are an ideal fit for workloads such as gaming, financial applications, simulation modeling applications such as those used in the automotive, aerospace, energy, and telecommunication industries, and other High Performance Computing applications.

Q: How are M5zn instances different than z1d instances?

z1d instances are a memory-optimized instance, and feature a high frequency version of the Intel Xeon Scalable processors (up to 4.0 GHz), along with local NVMe storage. M5zn instances are a general purpose instance, and feature a high frequency version of the 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors up to 4.5 GHz), along with up to 100 Gbps networking performance, and support for EFA. M5zn instances offer improved price performance compared to z1d.

High Memory instances

Q: What are EC2 High Memory instances?

Amazon EC2 High Memory (U-1 and U7i) instances offer 3, 6, 8, 9, 12, 16, 18, 24, or 32 TiB of memory in a single instance. These instances are purpose built to run large in-memory databases business applications, including SAP deployments that rely on these databases.

EC2 High Memory (U-1) instances with 3, 6, 9, and 12 TiB are powered by Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8176M (Skylake) or 8280L (Cascade Lake) processors. EC2 High Memory (U-1) instances with 18 TiB and 24 TiB are powered by  2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable 8280L (Cascade Lake) processors.

Amazon EC2 U7i instances are powered by 1.9 GHz (Turbo Boost to 2.90 GHz) 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids) and support up to 1920 vCPUs. U7i instances are the first DDR5 memory based 8-socket offering by a leading cloud provider. U7inh instances are the first 32TB virtualized instance in cloud with SAP certification for standard sizing for both OLTP and OLAP workload.

Amazon EC2 High Memory instances offer up to 160Gbps of Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth for storage volumes including io2 Block Express to support IO-intensive use cases such as data hydration, backup/restore.

Q: Are High Memory instances certified by SAP to run SAP HANA workloads?

High Memory (U-1 and U7i) instances with 3, 6, 8, 9, 12, 16, 18, 24, 32 (U7inh) TiB of memory are certified by SAP for running Business Suite on HANA, the next-generation Business Suite S/4HANA, Data Mart Solutions on HANA, Business Warehouse on HANA, and SAP BW/4HANA in production environments. For details, see SAP's Certified and Supported SAP HANA Hardware Directory.

Q: What instance types are available for High Memory instances?

High Memory instances are available as both bare metal (U-1 only) and virtualized instances (U-1 and U7i), giving customers the choice to have direct access to the underlying hardware resources, or to take advantage of the additional flexibility that virtualized instances offer including On-Demand and 1-year and 3-year Savings Plan purchase options. Please check out available options for High Memory instances in the Memory optimized section of EC2 Instance types page.

Q: What are some of the benefits of using High Memory Virtualized instances over High Memory Bare Metal instances?

Benefits of High Memory virtual instances over High Memory Metal instances include – significantly better launch/reboot times, flexible purchase options (On-Demand, Savings Plan, Reserved Instances, Dedicated Hosts), choice of tenancy type, self-service options and support for a higher number of EBS volumes.

Q: When should a High Memory ‘Metal’ instance be used vs using High Memory ‘Virtualized’ instance?

Though High Memory ‘Virtualized’ instances are in-general recommended to be used, there are specific situations where only High Memory Metal instances can work. These situations include – when using OS versions that are not supported on High Memory Virtual instances OR when using applications that need to run in non-virtualized mode to meet licensing / support requirements OR when using applications that require access to hardware feature set (such as Intel VT-x) OR when using custom hypervisor (e.g, ESXi).

Q: How do I migrate from High Memory metal instances to High Memory virtualized instances?

You can migrate your High Memory metal instance to a virtualized instance in just few steps. 1/Stop your instance, 2/ Change the instance and tenancy type through EC2 API and 3/ Start your instance back up. If you are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP, you need to ensure that your operating system and kernel versions are compatible with virtualized High Memory instances. For further details, see Migrating SAP HANA on AWS to an EC2 High Memory Instance documentation.

Q: What are the storage options available with High Memory instances?

High Memory instances support Amazon EBS volumes for storage. High Memory instances are EBS-optimized by default.

Q: Which storage interface is supported on High Memory instances?

High Memory instances access EBS volumes via PCI attached NVM Express (NVMe) interfaces. EBS volumes attached to High Memory instances appear as NVMe devices. NVMe is an efficient and scalable storage interface, which is commonly used for flash based SSDs and provides latency reduction and results in increased disk I/O and throughput. The EBS volumes are attached and detached by PCI hotplug.

Q: What network performance is supported on High Memory instances?

High Memory instances use the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) for networking and enable Enhanced Networking by default. With ENA, High Memory instances can utilize up to 100 Gbps (U-1) and up to 200Gbps (U7i) of network bandwidth

Q: Can I run High Memory instances in my existing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)?

You can run High Memory instances in your existing and new Amazon VPCs.

Q: What is the underlying hypervisor on High Memory instances?

High Memory instances use the lightweight Nitro Hypervisor that is based on core KVM technology.

Q: Do High Memory instances enable CPU power management state control?

Yes. You can configure C-states and P-states on High Memory (U-1 metal) instances.  You can configure C-states on both U-1 and U7i virtual instances.   You can use C-states to enable higher turbo frequencies (as much as 4.0 GHz). You can also use P-states to lower performance variability by pinning all cores at P1 or higher P states, which is similar to disabling Turbo, and running consistently at the base CPU clock speed.

Q: What purchase options are available for High Memory instances?

EC2 High Memory virtualized instances are available for purchase via On-Demand, 1-Yr and 3-Yr Savings Plan, and 1-Yr and 3-Yr Reserved Instance. EC2 High Memory metal instances are only available for purchase as EC2 Dedicated Hosts on a 1-Yr and 3-Yr Reservation.

Q: What is the lifecycle of a Dedicated Host?

Once a Dedicated Host is allocated within your account, it will be standing by for your use. You can then launch an instance with a tenancy of "host" using the RunInstances API, and can also stop/start/terminate the instance through the API. You can use the AWS Management Console to manage the Dedicated Host and the instance. 

Q: Can I launch, stop/start, and terminate High Memory instances using AWS CLI/SDK?

You can launch, stop/start, and terminate instances using AWS CLI/SDK.

Q: Which AMIs are supported with High memory instances?

EBS-backed HVM AMIs with support for ENA networking can be used with High Memory instances. The latest Amazon Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server, and Windows Server AMIs are supported. Operating system support for SAP HANA workloads on High Memory instances include: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3 for SAP, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for SAP, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 for SAP, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP4 for SAP, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 for SAP, Red Had Enterprise Linux 7.6 for SAP. Refer to SAP on AWS Technical Documentation for the latest details on supported operating systems.

Q: Are there standard SAP HANA reference deployment frameworks available for the High Memory instance and the AWS Cloud?

You can use the AWS Quick Start reference SAP HANA deployments to rapidly deploy all the necessary SAP HANA building blocks on High Memory instances following SAP’s recommendations for high performance and reliability. AWS Quick Starts are modular and customizable, so you can layer additional functionality on top or modify them for your own implementations.

Memory Optimized instances

Q: When should I use memory-optimized instances?

Memory-optimized instances offer large memory size for memory intensive applications including in-memory applications, in-memory databases, in-memory analytics solutions, HPC, scientific computing, and other memory-intensive applications. 

Q: What are Amazon EC2 R6g instances?

Amazon EC2 R6g instances are the next-generation of memory-optimized instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 Processors. R6g instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over R5 instances. They are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and Nitro hypervisor.

Q: What are some of the ideal use cases for R6g instances?

R6g instances deliver significant price performance benefits for memory-intensive workloads such as instances and are ideal for running memory-intensive workloads such as open-source databases, in-memory caches, and real time big data analytics. Customers deploying applications built on open source software across R instances will find the R6g instances an appealing option to realize the best price performance within the instance family. Arm developers can also build their applications directly on native Arm hardware as opposed to cross-compilation or emulation.

Q: What are the various storage options available on R6g instances?

R6g instances are EBS-optimized by default and offer up to 19,000 Mbps of dedicated EBS bandwidth to both encrypted and unencrypted EBS volumes. R6g instances only support Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) interface to access EBS storage volumes. Additionally, options with local NVMe instance storage are also available through the R6gd instance types.

Q: Which network interface is supported on R6g instances?

R6g instances support ENA based Enhanced Networking. With ENA, R6g instances can deliver up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth between instances when launched within a Placement Group.

Q: Will customers need to modify their applications and workloads to be able to run on the R6g instances?

The changes required are dependent on the application. Customers running applications built on open source software will find that the Arm ecosystem is well developed and already likely supports their applications. Most Linux distributions as well as containers (Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECR) support the Arm architecture. Customers will find Arm versions of commonly used software packages available for installation through the same mechanisms that they currently use. Applications that are based on interpreted languages (such as Java, Node, Python) not reliant on native CPU instruction sets should run with minimal to no changes. Applications developed using compiled languages (C, C++, GoLang) will need to be re-compiled to generate Arm binaries. The Arm architecture is well supported in these popular programming languages and modern code usually requires a simple ‘Make’ command. Refer to the Getting Started guide on GitHub for more details.

Q: Why should you choose R6i instances over R5 instances?

Amazon R6i instances are powered by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over R5 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). Amazon EC2 R6i instances use a lower-case “i” to indicate they are Intel-powered instances. R6i instances provide a new instance size (r6i.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 1,024 GiB of memory, 33% more than the largest R5 instance. They also provide up to 20% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU compared to R5 instances, allowing you to efficiently perform real-time analysis for data-intensive AI/ML, gaming, and high performance computing (HPC) applications. R6i instances also give you up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, twice that of R5 instances. With R6i instances, you can use Elastic Fabric Adapter allows customers to use Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) on the 32xlarge and metal sizes, enabling low-latency and high-scale inter-node communication. For optimal networking performance on these new instances, Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) driver update may be required. For more information about an optimal ENA driver for R6i, see "What do I need to do before migrating my EC2 instance to a sixth-generation instance?" on Knowledge Center.

Q: What are Amazon EC2 R5b instances?

R5b instances are EBS-optimized variants of memory-optimized R5 instances that deliver up to 3x better EBS performance compared to same sized R5 instances. R5b instances deliver up to 60 Gbps bandwidth and 260K IOPS of EBS performance, the fastest block storage performance on EC2. They are built on the AWS Nitro System, which is a combination of dedicated hardware and Nitro hypervisor.

Q: What are some of the ideal use cases for R5b instances?

R5b instances are ideal for large relational database workloads, including Microsoft SQL Server, SAP HANA, IBM DB2, and Oracle that run performance intensive applications such as commerce platforms, ERP systems, and health record systems. Customers looking to migrate large on-premises workloads with large storage performance requirements to AWS will find R5b instances to be a good fit.

Q: What are the various storage options available on R5b instances?

R5b instances are EBS-optimized by default and offer up to 60,000 Mbps of dedicated EBS bandwidth and 260K IOPS for both encrypted and unencrypted EBS volumes. R5b instances only support Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) interface to access EBS storage volumes. R5b is supported by all volume types, with the exception of io2 volumes.

Q: When should I use R5b instances?

Customers running workloads such as large relational databases and data analytics that want to take advantage of the increased EBS storage network performance can use R5b instances to deliver higher performance and bandwidth. Customers can also lower costs by migrating their workloads to smaller size R5b instances or by consolidating workloads on fewer R5b instances.

Q: What are the storage options available with High Memory instances?

High Memory instances support Amazon EBS volumes for storage. High Memory instances are EBS-optimized by default, and offer up to 38Gbps of storage bandwidth to both encrypted and unencrypted EBS volumes.

Q: What are Amazon EC2 X2gd instances?

Amazon EC2 X2gd instances are the next generation of memory-optimized instances powered by AWS-designed Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors. X2gd instances deliver up to 55% better price performance compared to x86-based X1 instances and offer the lowest cost per GiB of memory in Amazon EC2. They are the first of the X instances to be built on the AWS Nitro System, which is a combination of dedicated hardware and Nitro hypervisor.

Q: What workloads are suited for X2gd instances?

X2gd is ideal for customers with Arm-compatible memory bound scale-out workloads such as Redis and Memcached in-memory databases, that need low latency memory access and benefit from more memory per vCPU. X2gd is also well suited for relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MySQL, and RDS Aurora. Customers who run memory intensive workloads such as Apache Hadoop, real-time analytics, and real-time caching servers will benefit from 1:16 vCPU to memory ratio of X2gd. Single threaded workloads such as EDA backend verification jobs will benefit from physical core and more memory of X2gd instances, allowing them to consolidate more workloads on to a single instance. X2gd instance also feature local NVMe SSD block storage to improve response times by acting as a caching layer.

Q: When should I use X2gd instances compared to the X1, X2i, or R instances?

X2gd instances are suitable for Arm-compatible memory bound scale-out workloads such as in-memory databases, memory analytics applications, open-source relational database workloads, EDA workloads, and large caching servers. X2gd instances offer customers the lowest cost per gigabyte of memory within EC2, with sizes up to 1 TiB. X2iezn, X2idn, X2iedn, X1, and X1e instances use x86 processors and are suitable for memory-intensive enterprise-class, scale-up workloads such as Windows workloads, in-memory databases (e.g. SAP HANA), and relational databases (e.g. OracleDB). Customers can leverage the x86-based X instances for larger memory sizes up to 4 TiB. R6g and R6gd instances are suitable for workloads such as web applications, databases, and search indexing queries that need more vCPUs during times of heavy data processing. Customers running memory bound workloads that need less than 1 TiB memory and have dependency on x86 instruction set such as Windows applications, and applications like Oracle or SAP can leverage R5 instances and R6 instances.

Q: When should I use X2idn and X2iedn instances?

X2idn and X2iedn instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with an all-core turbo frequency up to 3.5 GHz and deliver up to 50% higher compute price performance than comparable X1 instances. X2idn and X2iedn instances both include up to 3.8 TB of local NVMe SSD storage and up to 100 Gbps of networking bandwidth, while X2idn offers up to 2 TiB of memory and X2iedn offers up to 4 TiB of memory. X2idn and X2iedn instances are SAP-Certified and are a great fit for workloads such as small-to large-scale traditional and in-memory databases, and analytics.

Q: When should I use X2iezn instances?

X2iezn instances feature the fastest Intel Xeon Scalable processors in the cloud and are a great fit for workloads that need high single-threaded performance combined with a high memory-to-vCPU ratio and high speed networking. X2iezn instances have an all-core turbo frequency up to 4.5 GHz, feature a 32:1 ratio of memory to vCPU, and deliver up to 55% higher compute price performance compared to X1e instances. X2iezn instances are a great fit for electronic design automation (EDA) workloads like physical verification, static timing analysis, power signoff, and full chip gate-level simulation.

Q: Which operating systems/AMIs are supported on X2gd instances?

The following AMIs are supported: Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 18.04 or newer, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 or newer, and SUSE Enterprise Server 15 or newer. Customers will find additional AMIs such as Fedora, Debian, NetBSD, and CentOS available through community AMIs and the AWS Marketplace. For containerized applications, Amazon ECS and EKS optimized AMIs are available as well.

Q: When should I use X1 instances?

X1 instances are ideal for running in-memory databases like SAP HANA, big data processing engines like Apache Spark or Presto, and high performance computing (HPC) applications. X1 instances are certified by SAP to run production environments of the next-generation Business Suite S/4HANA, Business Suite on HANA (SoH), Business Warehouse on HANA (BW), and Data Mart Solutions on HANA on the AWS cloud.

Q: Do X1 and X1e instances enable CPU power management state control?

Yes. You can configure C-states and P-states on x1e.32xlarge, x1e.16xlarge, x1e.8xlarge, x1.32xlarge and x1.16xlarge instances. You can use C-states to enable higher turbo frequencies (as much as 3.1 GHz with one or two core turbo). You can also use P-states to lower performance variability by pinning all cores at P1 or higher P states, which is similar to disabling Turbo, and running consistently at the base CPU clock speed.

x1e.32xlarge will also support Windows Server 2012 R2 and 2012 RTM. x1e.xlarge, x1e.2xlarge, x1e.4xlarge, x1e.8xlarge, x1e.16xlarge and x1.32xlarge will also support Windows Server 2012 R2, 2012 RTM and 2008 R2 64bit (Windows Server 2008 SP2 and older versions will not be supported) and x1.16xlarge will support Windows Server 2012 R2, 2012 RTM, 2008 R2 64bit, 2008 SP2 64bit, and 2003 R2 64bit (Windows Server 32bit versions will not be supported).

Q: Are there standard SAP HANA reference deployment frameworks available for the High Memory instance and the AWS?

You can use AWS Launch Wizard for SAP or AWS Quick Start reference SAP HANA deployments to rapidly deploy all the necessary SAP HANA building blocks on High Memory instances following recommendations from AWS and SAP for high performance and reliability.

Previous Generation instances

Q: Why don’t I see M1, C1, CC2 and HS1 instances on the pricing pages any more?

These have been moved to the Previous Generation Instance page.

Q: Are these Previous Generation instances still being supported?

Yes. Previous Generation instances are still fully supported.

Q: Can I still use/add more Previous Generation instances?

Yes. Previous Generation instances are still available as On-Demand, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instance, from our APIs, CLI and EC2 Management Console interface.

Q: Are my Previous Generation instances going to be deleted?

No. Until instances reach end of life and are fully deprecated, previous generation instances will be fully functional and will not be deleted because of this change. If AWS decides to deprecate previous generation instances due to end of life considerations, you will be notified of that change.  

Q: Are Previous Generation instances being discontinued soon?

With any rapidly evolving technology the latest generation will typically provide the best performance for the price and we encourage our customers to take advantage of technological advancements. If AWS decides to deprecate previous generation instances due to end of life considerations, you will be notified of that change.

Q: Will my Previous Generation instances I purchased as a Reserved Instance be affected or changed?

No. Your Reserved Instances will not change, and the Previous Generation instances are not going away.

Storage Optimized instances

Q: What is a Dense-storage Instance?

Dense-storage instances are designed for workloads that require high sequential read and write access to very large data sets, such as Hadoop distributed computing, massively parallel processing data warehousing, and log processing applications. The Dense-storage instances offer the best price/GB-storage and price/disk-throughput across other EC2 instances.

Q: How do dense-storage instances compare to High I/O instances?

High I/O instances (Im4gn, Is4gen, I4i, I3, I3en) are targeted at workloads that demand low latency and high random I/O in addition to moderate storage density and provide the best price/IOPS across other EC2 instance types. Dense-storage instances (D3, D3en, D2) and HDD-storage instances (H1) are optimized for applications that require high sequential read/write access and low cost storage for very large data sets and provide the best price/GB-storage and price/disk-throughput across other EC2 instances.

Q: How much disk throughput can Dense-storage and HDD-storage instances deliver?

The largest current generation of Dense HDD-storage instances, d3en.12xlarge, can deliver up to 6.2 GiB/s read and 6.2 GiB/s write disk throughput with a 128k block size. Please see the product detail page for additional performance information. To ensure the best disk throughput performance from your D2, D3 and D3en instances on Linux, we recommend that you use the most recent version of the Amazon Linux AMI, or another Linux AMI with a kernel version of 3.8 or later that supports persistent grants—an extension to the Xen block ring protocol that significantly improves disk throughput and scalability.

Q: Do Dense-storage and HDD-storage instances provide any failover mechanisms or redundancy?

D2 and H1 instances provide notifications for hardware failures. Like all instance storage, Dense HDD-storage volumes persist only for the life of the instance. Hence, we recommend that you build a degree of redundancy (e.g. RAID 1/5/6) or use file systems (e.g. HDFS and MapR-FS) that support redundancy and fault tolerance. You can also back up data periodically to more data storage solutions such as Amazon EBS or Amazon S3.

Q: How do dense HDD-storage instances differ from Amazon EBS?

Amazon EBS offers simple, elastic, reliable (replicated), and persistent block level storage for Amazon EC2 while abstracting the details of the underlying storage media in use. Amazon EC2 instance instances with local HDD or NVMe storage provide directly attached, high performance storage building blocks that can be used for a variety of storage applications. Dense-storage instances are specifically targeted at customers who want high sequential read/write access to large data sets on local storage, e.g. for Hadoop distributed computing and massively parallel processing data warehousing.

Q: Can I launch dense HDD-storage instances as Amazon EBS optimized instances?

Each HDD-storage instance type (H1, D2, D3, and D3en) is EBS optimized by default. Since this feature is always enabled, launching one of these instances explicitly as EBS optimized will not affect the instance's behavior. For more information, see Amazon EBS–optimized instances.

Q: Can I launch D2 instances as Amazon EBS optimized instances?

Each D2 instance type is EBS optimized by default. D2 instances 500 Mbps to 4,000 Mbps to EBS above and beyond the general-purpose network throughput provided to the instance. Since this feature is always enabled on D2 instances, launching a D2 instance explicitly as EBS optimized will not affect the instance's behavior.

Q: What is a High I/O instance?

High I/O instances use NVMe based local instance storage to deliver very high, low latency, I/O capacity to applications, and are optimized for applications that require millions of IOPS. Like Cluster instances, High I/O instances can be clustered via cluster placement groups for low latency networking.

Q: Are all features of Amazon EC2 available for High I/O instances?

High I/O instances support all Amazon EC2 features. Im4gn, Is4gen, I4i, I3 and I3en instances offer NVMe only storage, while previous generation I2 instances allow legacy blkfront storage access.

Q: AWS has other database and Big Data offerings. When or why should I use High I/O instances?

High I/O instances are ideal for applications that require access to millions of low latency IOPS, and can leverage data stores and architectures that manage data redundancy and availability. Example applications are:

• NoSQL databases like Cassandra and MongoDB

• In-memory databases like Aerospike

• Elasticsearch and analytics workloads

• OLTP systems

Q: Do High I/O instances provide any failover mechanisms or redundancy?

Like other Amazon EC2 instance types, instance storage on Im4gn, Is4gen, I4i, I3 and I3en instances persists during the life of the instance. Customers are expected to build resilience into their applications. We recommend using databases and file systems that support redundancy and fault tolerance. Customers should back up data periodically to Amazon S3 for improved data durability.

Q: Do High I/O instances support TRIM?

The TRIM command allows the operating system to inform SSDs which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internally. In the absence of TRIM, future write operations to the involved blocks can slow down significantly. Im4gn, Is4gen, I4i, I3 and I3en instances support TRIM.

Q: How do D3 and D3en instances compare to D2 instances?

D3 and D3en instances offer improved specifications over D2 on the following compute, storage and network attributes:

• D3 and D3en instances offer up to 30% higher compute performances than equivalent D2 instances. Exact performance benefit will depend on the specific workload.

• D3 and D3en instances provide up to 45% and 100% higher disk throughput than D2 instances, respectively.

• D3 instances are available at a price that is 5% lower than D2 instances. D3en instances lower cost per TB of storage by up to 80% compared to D2 instances.

• D3 and D3en instances offer Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX 512), which offer up to 2X the FLOPS per cycle compared to AVX 2 on D2.

• D3en instances offer a new instance size (12xl) with 48 vCPUs and 7 TB of storage per vCPU for 336 TB of total storage, but have half the memory per vCPU compared to D2 and 48 TB of total storage.

• D3 and D3en instances offer up to 25 Gbps and 75 Gbps of network bandwidth respectively on their largest sizes to meet customer needs for network performance for running big data workloads and file system clusters.

Q: Do D3 and D3en instances encrypt storage volumes and network traffic?

Yes; data written onto the storage volumes will be encrypted at rest using AES-256-XTS. Network traffic between D3 and D3en instances in the same VPC or a peered VPC are encrypted by default using a 256-bit key.

Q: How do Amazon EC2 Flex instances (M7i-flex and C7i-flex) differentiate from comparable instances (M7i and C7i)? When should I use Flex instances over comparable instances?

Flex instances (M7i-flex and C7i-flex) are lower priced variants of comparable instances (M7i and C7i) and offer 19% better price performance compared to the previous generation of instances (M6i and C6i). Flex instances can be used to run a majority of workloads that benefit from the latest generation performance but do not fully utilize compute resources. These instances are designed to deliver a baseline CPU performance with the ability to scale up to the full CPU performance 95% of the time. Flex instances are ideal for workloads that fit on instance sizes up to 16xlarge (up to 64 vCPUs and up to 256 GB), including web and application servers, databases, virtual desktops, batch processing, microservices, caches, enterprise applications, Apache Kafka, and Elasticsearch. You can use comparable instances (M7i and C7i) for workloads that need the largest instance sizes or high sustained CPU, network, or EBS performance, such as large application servers and databases, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, CPU-based machine learning (ML), video encoding and streaming, batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), and ad serving.

Q: What performance do Flex instances provide?

Flex instances provide reliable CPU resources to deliver a baseline CPU performance of 40%, designed to meet the compute requirements of the majority of workloads. For times when workloads need more performance, Flex instances provide the ability to scale up to 100% CPU for 95% of the time over a 24-hour window.

Q: What are some other use cases for M7i-flex instances?

The M7i-flex instances provide a compelling upgrade path for workloads running on T3 larger-sized instances (large to 2xlarge) by offering better price performance, a fixed hourly price that includes baseline CPU and additional CPU usage beyond baseline, and larger instance sizes up to 8xlarge (32vCPUs and 128 GB). M7i-flex instances offer a simplified way to optimize your EC2 usage without CPU credits.

Q: How are Burstable Performance Instances different?

Amazon EC2 allows you to choose between Fixed Performance Instances (e.g. C, M and R instance families) and Burstable Performance Instances (e.g. T2). Burstable Performance Instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline.

T2 instances’ baseline performance and ability to burst are governed by CPU Credits. Each T2 instance receives CPU Credits continuously, the rate of which depends on the instance size. T2 instances accrue CPU Credits when they are idle, and consume CPU credits when they are active. A CPU Credit provides the performance of a full CPU core for one minute. 

* For the t2.medium, single threaded applications can use 40% of 1 core, or if needed, multithreaded applications can use 20% each of 2 cores.

**For the t2.large, single threaded applications can use 60% of 1 core, or if needed, multithreaded applications can use 30% each of 2 cores.

*** For the t2.xlarge, single threaded applications can use 90% of 1 core, or if needed, multithreaded applications can use 45% each of 2 cores or 22.5% of all 4 cores.

**** For the t2.2xlarge, single threaded applications can use all of 1 core, or if needed, multithreaded applications can use 67.5% each of 2 cores or 16.875% of all 8 cores.

Q: How do I choose the right Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for my T2 instances?

You will want to verify that the minimum memory requirements of your operating system and applications are within the memory allocated for each T2 instance size (for example, 512 MiB for t2.nano). Operating systems with Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) that consume significant memory and CPU, for example Microsoft Windows, might need a t2.micro or larger instance size for many use cases. You can find AMIs suitable for the t2.nano instance types on AWS Marketplace. Windows customers who do not need the GUI can use the Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Core AMI.

Q: When should I choose a Burstable Performance Instance, such as T2?

T2 instances provide a cost-effective platform for a broad range of general purpose production workloads. T2 Unlimited instances can sustain high CPU performance for as long as required. If your workloads consistently require CPU usage much higher than the baseline, consider a dedicated CPU instances such as the M or C.

Q: How can I see the CPU Credit balance for each T2 instance?

You can see the CPU Credit balance for each T2 instance in EC2 per-Instance metrics in Amazon CloudWatch. T2 instances have four metrics, CPUCreditUsage, CPUCreditBalance, CPUSurplusCreditBalance and CPUSurplusCreditsCharged. CPUCreditUsage indicates the amount of CPU Credits used. CPUCreditBalance indicates the balance of CPU Credits. CPUSurplusCredit Balance indicates credits used for bursting in the absence of earned credits. CPUSurplusCreditsCharged indicates credits that are charged when average usage exceeds the baseline.

Q: What happens to CPU performance if my T2 instance is running low on credits (CPU Credit balance is near zero)?

If your T2 instance has a zero CPU Credit balance, performance will remain at baseline CPU performance. For example, the t2.micro provides baseline CPU performance of 10% of a physical CPU core. If your instance’s CPU Credit balance is approaching zero, CPU performance will be lowered to baseline performance over a 15-minute interval.

Q: Does my T2 instance credit balance persist at stop / start?

No, a stopped instance does not retain its previously earned credit balance.

Q: Can T2 instances be purchased as Reserved Instances or Spot Instances?

T2 instances can be purchased as On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances or Spot Instances.

Q: What are Amazon EC2 T4g instances?

Amazon EC2 T4g instances are the next-generation of general purpose burstable instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors. T4g instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances. They are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and Nitro hypervisor.

Q: What are some of the ideal use cases for T4g instances?

T4g instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances for a wide variety of burstable general purpose workloads such as micro-services, low-latency interactive applications, small and medium databases, virtual desktops, development environments, code repositories, and business-critical applications. Customers deploying applications built on open source software across T instances will find the T4g instances an appealing option to realize the best price performance. Arm developers can also build their applications directly on native Arm hardware as opposed to cross-compilation or emulation.

Q: How can customers get access to the T4g free trial?

Until December 31, 2025, all AWS customers will be enrolled automatically in the T4g free trial as detailed in the AWS Free Tier. During the free-trial period, customers who run a t4g.small instance will automatically get 750 free hours per month deducted from their bill during each month. The 750 hours are calculated in aggregate across all Regions in which the t4g.small instances are used. Customers must pay for surplus CPU credits when they exceed the instances allocated credits during the 750 free hours of the T4g free trial program. For more information about how CPU credits work, see Key concepts and definitions for burstable performance instances in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.

Q: Who is eligible for the T4g free trial?

All existing and new customers with an AWS account can take advantage of the T4g free trial. The T4g free trial is available for a limited time until December 31, 2025. The start and end time of the free trial are based on the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The T4g free trial will be available in addition to the existing AWS Free Tier on t2.micro/t3.micro. Customers who have exhausted their t2.micro (or t3.micro, depending on the Region) Free Tier usage can still benefit from the T4g free trial.

Q: What is the regional availability of T4g free trial?

The T4g free trial is currently available across these AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), and Europe (Stockholm). It is currently not available in the China (Beijing) and China (Ningxia) Regions.

As part of the free trial, customers can run t4g.small instances across one or multiple Regions from a single cumulative bucket of 750 free hours per month until December 31, 2025. For example, a customer can run t4g.small in Oregon for 300 hours for a month and run another t4g.small in Tokyo for 450 hours during the same month. This would add up to 750 hours per month of the free-trial limit.

Q: Is there an additional charge for running specific AMIs under the T4g free trial?

Under the t4g.small free trial, there will be no Amazon Machine Image (AMI) charge for Amazon Linux 2, RHEL and SUSE Linux AMIs that are available through the EC2 console Quick Start for the first 750 free hours per month. After 750 free hours per month, regular On-Demand prices, including AMI charge (if any), will apply. The applicable software fees for AWS Marketplace offers with AMI fulfillment options is not included in the free trial. Only the t4g.small infrastructure cost is included and covered under the free trial.

Q: How will the t4g.small free trial be reflected on my AWS bill?

The T4g free trial has a monthly billing cycle that starts on the first of every month and ends on the last day of that month. Under the T4g free-trial billing plan, customers using t4g.small will see a $0 line item on their bill under the On-Demand pricing plan for the first 750 aggregate hours of usage for every month during the free-trial period. Customers can start any time during the free-trial period and get 750 free hours for the remainder of that month. Any unused hours from the previous month will not be carried over. Customers can launch multiple t4g.small instances under the free trial. Customers will be notified automatically through email using AWS Budgets when their aggregate monthly usage reaches 85% of 750 free hours. When the aggregate instance usage exceeds 750 hours for the monthly billing cycle, customers will be charged based on regular On-Demand pricing for the exceeded hours for that month. For customers with a Compute Savings Plan or T4g Instance Savings Plan, Savings Plan (SV) discount will be applied to On-Demand pricing for hours exceeding the 750 free trial hours. If customers have purchased the T4g Reserved Instance (RI) plan, the RI plan applies first to any usage on an hourly basis. For any remaining usage after the RI plan has been applied, the free trial billing plan is in effect.

Q: If customers sign up for consolidated billing (or a single payer account), can they get the T4g free trial for each account that is tied to the payer account?

No, customers who use consolidated billing to consolidate payment across multiple accounts will have access to one free trial per Organization. Each payer account gets a total aggregate of 750 free hours a month. For more details about consolidated billing, see Consolidated billing for AWS Organizations in the AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide.

Q: Will customers get charged for surplus CPU credits as a part of T4g free trial?

Customers must pay for surplus CPU credits when they exceed the instances allocated credits during the 750 free hours of the T4g free trial program. For details about how CPU credits work, see Key concepts and definitions for burstable performance instances in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.

Q: At the end of the free trial, how will customers be billed for t4g.small instances?

Starting January 1, 2026, customers running on t4g.small instances will be automatically switched from the free trial plan to the On-Demand pricing plan (or Reserved Instance (RI)/Savings Plan (SV) plan, if purchased). Accumulated credits will be set to zero. Customers will receive an email notification seven days before the end of the free trial period stating that the free trial period will be ending in seven days. Starting January 1, 2026, if the RI plan is purchased, the RI plans will apply. Otherwise, customers will be charged regular On-Demand pricing for t4g.small instances. For customers who have the T4g Instance Savings Plan or a Compute Savings Plan, t4g.small instance billing will apply the Savings Plan discount on their On-Demand pricing.

Q: When should I use Compute Optimized instances?

Compute Optimized instances are designed for applications that benefit from high compute power. These applications include compute-intensive applications like high-performance web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), scientific modelling, distributed analytics and machine learning inference.

Q: What are Amazon EC2 C7g instances?

Amazon EC2 C7g instances, powered by the latest generation AWS Graviton3 processors, provide the best price performance in Amazon EC2 for compute-intensive workloads. C7g instances are ideal for high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, electronic design automation (EDA), gaming, video encoding, scientific modeling, distributed analytics, CPU-based machine learning (ML) inference, and ad-serving. They offer up to 25% better performance over the sixth generation AWS Graviton2-based C6g instances.

Q: What are Amazon EC2 C6g instances?

Amazon EC2 C6g instances are the next-generation of compute-optimized instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 Processors. C6g instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over C5 instances. They are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and Nitro hypervisor.

Q: What are some of the ideal use cases for C6g instances?

C6g instances deliver significant price performance benefits for compute-intensive workloads such as high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, ad serving, video encoding, gaming, scientific modelling, distributed analytics, and CPU-based machine learning inference. Customers deploying applications built on open source software across C instances family will find the C6g instances an appealing option to realize the best price performance. Arm developers can also build their applications directly on native Arm hardware as opposed to cross-compilation or emulation.

Q: What are the various storage options available on C6g instances?

C6g instances are EBS-optimized by default and offer up to 19,000 Mbps of dedicated EBS bandwidth to both encrypted and unencrypted EBS volumes. C6g instances only support Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) interface to access EBS storage volumes. Additionally, options with local NVMe instance storage are also available through the C6gd instance types.

Q: Which network interface is supported on C6g instances?

C6g instances support ENA based Enhanced Networking. With ENA, C6g instances can deliver up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth between instances when launched within a Placement Group.

Q: Will customers need to modify their applications and workloads to be able to run on the C6g instances?

The changes required are dependent on the application. Customers running applications built on open source software will find that the Arm ecosystem is well developed and already likely supports their applications. Most Linux distributions as well as containers (Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECR) support the Arm architecture. Customers will find Arm versions of commonly used software packages available for installation through the same mechanisms that they currently use. Applications that are based on interpreted languages (such as Java, Node, Python) not reliant on native CPU instruction sets should run with minimal to no changes. Applications developed using compiled languages (C, C++, GoLang) will need to be re-compiled to generate Arm binaries. The Arm architecture is well supported in these popular programming languages and modern code usually requires a simple ‘Make’ command. Refer to the Getting Started guide on GitHub for more details.

Q: Will there be more compute choices offered with the C6 instance families?

Yes, we plan to offer Intel and AMD CPU powered instances in the future as part of the C6 instance families.

Q: Can I launch C4 instances as Amazon EBS-optimized instances?

Each C4 instance type is EBS-optimized by default. C4 instances 500 Mbps to 4,000 Mbps to EBS above and beyond the general-purpose network throughput provided to the instance. Since this feature is always enabled on C4 instances, launching a C4 instance explicitly as EBS-optimized will not affect the instance's behavior.

Q: How can I use the processor state control feature available on the c4.8xlarge instance?

The c4.8xlarge instance type provides the ability for an operating system to control processor C-states and P-states. This feature is currently available only on Linux instances. You may want to change C-state or P-state settings to increase processor performance consistency, reduce latency, or tune your instance for a specific workload. By default, Amazon Linux provides the highest-performance configuration that is optimal for most customer workloads; however, if your application would benefit from lower latency at the cost of higher single- or dual-core frequencies, or from lower-frequency sustained performance as opposed to bursty Turbo Boost frequencies, then you should consider experimenting with the C-state or P-state configuration options that are available to these instances. For additional information on this feature, see the Amazon EC2 User Guide section on Processor State Control.

Q: Which instances are available within Compute Optimized instances category?

C6g instances: Amazon EC2 C6g instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors. They deliver up to 40% better price performance over C5 instances and are ideal for running advanced compute-intensive workloads. This includes workloads such as high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, ad serving, video encoding, gaming, scientific modelling, distributed analytics, and CPU-based machine learning inference. 

C6a instances: C6a instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz, offer up to 15% better price performance over C5a instances for a wide variety of workloads, and support always-on memory encryption using AMD Transparent Single Key Memory Encryption (TSME). C6a instances provide new instance sizes with up to 192 vCPUs and 384 GiB of memory, double that of the largest C5a instance. C6a also gives customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, more than twice that of C5a instances.

C6i instances: C6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better price performance over C5 instances for a wide variety of workloads, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory encryption (TME). C6i instances provide a new instance size (c6i.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 256 GiB of memory, 33% more than the largest C5 instance. They also provide up to 9% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU compared to C5 instances. C6i also give customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, twice that of C5 instances. C6i are also available with local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage (C6id instances) for applications that need high-speed, low-latency local storage. Compared to previous generation C5d instances, C6id instances offer up to 138% higher TB storage per vCPU and 56% lower cost per TB.

C5 instances: C5 instances are based on Intel Xeon Platinum processors, part of the Intel Xeon Scalable (codenamed Skylake-SP or Cascade Lake) processor family, are available in 9 sizes, and offer up to 96 vCPUs and 192 GiB memory. C5 instances deliver 25% improvement in price/performance compared to C4 instances. The C5d instances have local NVMe storage for workloads that require very low latency and storage access with high random read and write IOPS ability.

C5a instances: C5a instances deliver leading x86 price-performance for a broad set of compute-intensive workloads including batch processing, distributed analytics, data transformations, log analysis, and web applications. C5a instances feature 2nd Gen 3.3GHz AMD EPYC processors with up to 96 vCPUs and up to 192 GiB of memory. The C5ad instances have local NVMe storage for workloads that require very low latency and storage access with high random read and write IOPS ability.

C5n instances: C5n instances are ideal for applications requiring high network bandwidth and packet rate. The C5n instances are ideal for applications like HPC, data lakes, network appliances as well as applications that require inter-node communication and the Message Passing Interface (MPI). C5n offer a choice of Intel Xeon Platinum 3.0 GHz processors with up to 72 vCPUs and 192GiB of Memory.

C4 instances: C4 instances are based on Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (codenamed Haswell) processors. C4 instances are available in 5 sizes and offer up to 36 vCPUs and 60 GiB memory.

Q: Why should customers choose C6i instances over C5 instances?

C6i instances offer up to 15% better price performance over C5 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory encryption (TME). C6i instances provide a new instance size (c6i.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 256 GiB of memory, 33% more than the largest C5 instance. They also provide up to 9% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU compared to C5 instances. C6i also give customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, twice that of C5 instances.

Q: Why should customers choose C5 instances over C4 instances?

The generational improvement in CPU performance and lower price of C5 instances, which combined result in a 25% price/performance improvement relative to C4 instances, benefit a broad spectrum of workloads that currently run on C3 or C4 instances. For floating point intensive applications, Intel AVX-512 enables significant improvements in delivered TFLOPS by effectively extracting data level parallelism. Customers looking for absolute performance for graphics rendering and HPC workloads that can be accelerated with GPUs or FPGAs should also evaluate other instance families in the Amazon EC2 portfolio that include those resources to find the ideal instance for their workload.

Q: Which storage interface is supported on C5 instances?

C5 instances will support only NVMe EBS device model. EBS volumes attached to C5 instances will appear as NVMe devices. NVMe is a modern storage interface that provides latency reduction and results in increased disk I/O and throughput.

Q: Why does the total memory reported by the operating system not exactly match the advertised memory on instance types?

Portions of the EC2 instance memory are reserved and used by the virtual BIOS for video RAM, DMI, and ACPI. In addition, for instances that are powered by the AWS Nitro Hypervisor, a small percentage of the instance memory is reserved by the Amazon EC2 Nitro Hypervisor to manage virtualization.

Q: Which instances are available within the high performance computing (HPC) instances category?

Hpc7g instances: Hpc7g instances enable the best price performance for HPC workloads on AWS. They deliver up to 70% better performance and almost 3x better price performance compared to previous-generation AWS Graviton-based instances for compute-intensive HPC workloads. Hpc7g instances are powered by AWS Graviton 3E processors and provide up to 35% higher vector instruction performance compared to existing AWS Graviton3 instances. These instances provide up to 2x better floating-point performance compared to instances powered by Graviton2 processors. Hpc7g instances are built on the AWS Nitro System and provide 200 Gbps network bandwidth for low-latency internode communication for tightly coupled workloads that require highly parallelized, clustered compute resources.

Hpc7a instances: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Hpc7a instances, powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors, deliver up to 2.5x better performance compared to Amazon EC2 Hpc6a instances. Hpc7a instances feature 2x higher core density (up to 192 cores), 2.1x higher memory bandwidth throughput (up to 768 GB of memory), and 3x higher network bandwidth compared to Hpc6a instances. These instances offer 300 Gbps of Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) network bandwidth, powered by the AWS Nitro System, for fast and low latency inter-node communications.

Hpc6id instances: Hpc6id instances are powered by 64 cores of Intel 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors that run at frequencies up to 3.5 GHz for increased efficiency. These instances are designed to improve performance for memory-bound workloads by offering 5 GB/s memory bandwidth per vCPU. Hpc6id instances offer 200 Gbps EFA networking for high-throughput internode communications to help you run your HPC workloads at scale.

Hpc6a instances: Hpc6a instances are powered by 96 cores of 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz and 384 GiB RAM. Hpc6a instances offer 100 Gbps EFA networking enabled for high throughput internode communications to help you run your HPC workloads at scale.

Q: How are Hpc7g instances different from other EC2 instances?

Hpc7g instances are optimized to deliver capabilities suited for compute-intensive HPC workloads. Hpc7g instances are based on Arm-based Graviton3E processors that provide up to 35% higher vector instruction performance compared to existing instances based on Graviton3 processors. These instances deliver 64 physical cores, 128 GiB memory, and 200 Gbps network bandwidth optimized for traffic between instances in the same VPC and support EFA for increased network performance. Hpc7g instances are available in single Availability Zone deployments, enabling workloads to achieve the low-latency network performance necessary for tightly coupled node-to-node communication for HPC applications.

Q: Which pricing models do Hpc7g instances support?

Hpc7g instances are available for purchase through the 1- and 3-year Amazon EC2 Instance Savings Plans, Compute Savings Plans, EC2 On-Demand Instances, and EC2 Reserved Instances.

Q: Which AMIs are supported on Hpc7g instances?

Hpc7g instances support Amazon EBS backed AMIs only.

Q: How are Hpc7a instances different from other EC2 instances?

HPC-optimized EC2 Hpc7a instances are ideal for applications that benefit from high-performance processors such as large, complex simulations including computational fluid dynamics (CFD), numerical weather prediction, and multiphysics simulations. Hpc7a instances are designed to help you run tightly coupled, x86-based HPC workloads with better performance. Hpc7a instances feature 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors with 2x higher core density (up to 192 cores), 2.1x higher memory bandwidth throughput (768 GB of memory), and 3x higher network bandwidth compared to Hpc6a instances. These instances offer 300 Gbpsof EFA network bandwidth, powered by the AWS Nitro System, for for fast and low latency internode communications.

Q: Which pricing models do Hpc7a instances support?

Hpc7a instances are available for purchase through the 1- and 3-year Amazon EC2 Instance Savings Plans, Compute Savings Plans, EC2 On-Demand Instances, and EC2 Reserved Instances.

Q: Which AMIs are supported on Hpc7a instances?

Hpc7a instances support Amazon Linux 2, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu 18.04 or later, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 or later, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3 or later, CentOS 7 or later, and FreeBSD 11.1 or later.

Q: Which pricing models do Hpc6id instances support?

Hpc6id instances are available for purchase through the 1-year and 3-year Amazon EC2 Instance Savings Plans, Compute Savings Plans, EC2 On-Demand Instances, and EC2 Reserved Instances.

Q: How are Hpc6id instances different from other EC2 instances?

Hpc6id instances are optimized to deliver capabilities suited for memory-bound, data-intensive HPC workloads. Hyperthreading is disabled to increase per-vCPU CPU throughput and up to 5 GB/s memory bandwidth per vCPU. These instances deliver 200 Gbps network bandwidth optimized for traffic between instances in the same virtual private cloud (VPC), and support EFA for increased network performance. To optimize Hpc6id instances networking for tightly coupled workloads, you can access EC2 Hpc6id instances in a single Availability Zone in each Region.

Q: Which AMIs are supported on Hpc6id instances?

Hpc6id supports Amazon Linux 2, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu 18.04 or later, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 or later, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 or later, CentOS 7 or later, Windows Server 2008 R2 or earlier, and FreeBSD 11.1 or later.

Q: Which AMIs are supported on Hpc6a instances?

Hpc6a instances support Amazon Linux 2, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu 18.04 or later, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 or later, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 or later, CentOS 7 or later, and FreeBSD 11.1 or later. These instances also support Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019.

Q: Which pricing models do Hpc6a instances support?

Hpc6a instances are available for purchase through 1-year and 3-year Standard Reserved Instances, Convertible Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and On-Demand Instances.

Q: What are Amazon EC2 M6g instances?

Amazon EC2 M6g instances are the next-generation of general-purpose instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 Processors. M6g instances deliver up to 40% better price/performance over M5 instances. They are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and Nitro hypervisor.

Q: What are the specifications of the new AWS Graviton2 Processors?

The AWS Graviton2 processors deliver up to 7x performance, 4x the number of compute cores, 2x larger caches, 5x faster memory, and 50% faster per core encryption performance than first generation AWS Graviton processors. Each core of the AWS Graviton2 processor is a single-threaded vCPU. These processors also offer always-on fully encrypted DRAM memory, hardware acceleration for compression workloads, dedicated engines per vCPU that double the floating-point performance for workloads such as video encoding, and instructions for int8/fp16 CPU-based machine learning inference acceleration. The CPUs are built utilizing 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS on the advanced 7 nm manufacturing technology.

Q: Is memory encryption supported by AWS Graviton2 processors?

AWS Graviton2 processors support always-on 256-bit memory encryption to further enhance security. Encryption keys are securely generated within the host system, do not leave the host system, and are irrecoverably destroyed when the host is rebooted or powered down. Memory encryption does not support integration with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) and customers cannot bring their own keys.

Q: What are some of the ideal use cases for M6g instances?

M6g instances deliver significant performance and price performance benefits for a broad spectrum of general-purpose workloads such as application servers, gaming servers, microservices, mid-size databases, and caching fleets. Customers deploying applications built on open source software across the M instances will find the M6g instances an appealing option to realize the best price performance. Arm developers can also build their applications directly on native Arm hardware as opposed to cross-compilation or emulation.

Q: What are the various storage options available on M6g instances?

M6g instances are EBS-optimized by default and offer up to 19,000 Mbps of dedicated EBS bandwidth to both encrypted and unencrypted EBS volumes. M6g instances only support Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) interface to access EBS storage volumes. Additionally, options with local NVMe instance storage are also available through the M6gd instance types.

Q: Which network interface is supported on M6g instances?

M6g instances support ENA based Enhanced Networking. With ENA, M6g instances can deliver up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth between instances when launched within a Placement Group.

Q: Will customers need to modify their applications and workloads to be able to run on the M6g instances?

The changes required are dependent on the application. Customers running applications built on open source software will find that the Arm ecosystem is well developed and already likely supports their applications. Most Linux distributions as well as containers (Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECR) support the Arm architecture. Customers will find Arm versions of commonly used software packages available for installation through the same mechanisms that they currently use. Applications that are based on interpreted languages (such as Java, Node, Python) not reliant on native CPU instruction sets should run with minimal to no changes. Applications developed using compiled languages (C, C++, GoLang) will need to be re-compiled to generate Arm binaries. The Arm architecture is well supported in these popular programming languages and modern code usually requires a simple ‘Make’ command. Refer to the Getting Started guide on GitHub for more details.

Q: What are Amazon EC2 A1 instances?

Amazon EC2 A1 instances are general purpose instances powered by the first-generation AWS Graviton Processors that are custom designed by AWS.

Q: What are the specifications of the first-generation AWS Graviton Processors? 

AWS Graviton processors are custom designed by AWS utilizing Amazon’s extensive expertise in building platform solutions for cloud applications running at scale. These processors are based on the 64-bit Arm instruction set and feature Arm Neoverse cores as well as custom silicon designed by AWS. The cores operate at a frequency of 2.3 GHz.

Q: When should I use A1 instances?

A1 instances deliver significant cost savings for scale-out workloads that can fit within the available memory footprint. A1 instances are ideal for scale-out applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, and data/log processing. These instances will also appeal to developers, enthusiasts, and educators across the Arm developer community.

Q: Will customers have to modify applications and workloads to be able to run on the A1 instances?

The changes required are dependent on the application. Applications based on interpreted or run-time compiled languages (e.g. Python, Java, PHP, Node.js) should run without modifications. Other applications may need to be recompiled and those that don't rely on x86 instructions will generally build with minimal to no changes.

Q: Which operating systems/AMIs are supported on A1 Instances?

The following AMIs are supported on A1 instances: Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 16.04.4 or newer, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.6 or newer, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 or newer. Additional AMI support for Fedora, Debian, NGINX Plus are also available through community AMIs and the AWS Marketplace. EBS backed HVM AMIs launched on A1 instances require NVMe and ENA drivers installed at instance launch.

Q: Are there specific AMI requirements to run on M6g and A1 instances?

You will need to use the “arm64” AMIs with the M6g and A1 instances. x86 AMIs are not compatible with M6g and A1 instances.

Q: When should customers use A1 instances versus the new M6g instances?

A1 instances continue to offer significant cost benefits for scale-out workloads that can run on multiple smaller cores and fit within the available memory footprint. The new M6g instances are a good fit for a broad spectrum of applications that require more compute, memory, networking resources and/or can benefit from scaling up across platform capabilities. M6g instances will deliver the best price-performance within the instance family for these applications. M6g supports up to 16xlarge instance size (A1 supports up to 4xlarge), 4GB of memory per vCPU (A1 supports 2GB memory per vCPU), and up to 25 Gbps of networking bandwidth (A1 supports up to 10 Gbps).

Q: What are the various storage options available to A1 customers?

A1 instances are EBS-optimized by default and offer up to 3,500 Mbps of dedicated EBS bandwidth to both encrypted and unencrypted EBS volumes. A1 instances only support Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) interface to access EBS storage volumes. A1 instances will not support the blkfront interface.

Q: Which network interface is supported on A1 instances?

A1 instances support ENA based Enhanced Networking. With ENA, A1 instances can deliver up to 10 Gbps of network bandwidth between instances when launched within a Placement Group.

Q: Do A1 instances support the AWS Nitro System?

Yes, A1 instances are powered by the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and Nitro hypervisor.

Q: Why should customers choose EC2 M5 Instances over EC2 M4 Instances?

Compared with EC2 M4 Instances, the new EC2 M5 Instances deliver customers greater compute and storage performance, larger instance sizes for less cost, consistency and security. The biggest benefit of EC2 M5 Instances is based on its usage of the latest generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Skylake-SP or Cascade Lake), which deliver up to 20% improvement in price/performance compared to M4. With AVX-512 support in M5 vs. the older AVX2 in M4, customers will gain 2x higher performance in workloads requiring floating point operations. M5 instances offer up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth and up to 10 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth to Amazon EBS. M5 instances also feature significantly higher networking and Amazon EBS performance on smaller instance sizes with EBS burst capability.

Q: Why should customers choose M6i instances over M5 instances?

Amazon M6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over M5 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). Amazon EC2 M6i instances are the first to use a lower-case “i” to indicate they are Intel-powered instances. M6i instances provide a new instance size (m6i.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 512 GiB of memory, 33% more than the largest M5 instance. They also provide up to 20% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU compared to M5 instances, allowing customers to efficiently perform real-time analysis for data-intensive AI/ML, gaming, and High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. M6i also give customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, twice that of M5 instances. M6i also allows customers to use Elastic Fabric Adapter on the 32xlarge size, enabling low latency and high scale inter-node communication. For optimal networking performance on these new instances, Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) driver update may be required. For more information on optimal ENA driver for M6i, see this article.

Q: How does support for Intel AVX-512 benefit customers who use the EC2 M5 family or the M6i family?

Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) is a set of new CPU instructions available on the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors, that can accelerate performance for workloads and usages such as scientific simulations, financial analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning/deep learning, 3D modeling and analysis, image and video processing, cryptography and data compression, among others. Intel AVX-512 offers exceptional processing of encryption algorithms, helping to reduce the performance overhead for cryptography, which means customers who use the EC2 M5 family or M6i family can deploy more secure data and services into distributed environments without compromising performance.

Q: What are M5zn instances?

M5zn instances are a variant of the M5 general purpose instances that are powered by the fastest Intel Xeon Scalable processor in the cloud, with an all-core turbo frequency of up to 4.5 GHz, along with 100 Gbps networking and support for Amazon EFA. M5zn instances are an ideal fit for workloads such as gaming, financial applications, simulation modeling applications such as those used in the automotive, aerospace, energy, and telecommunication industries, and other High Performance Computing applications.

Q: How are M5zn instances different than z1d instances?

z1d instances are a memory-optimized instance, and feature a high frequency version of the Intel Xeon Scalable processors (up to 4.0 GHz), along with local NVMe storage. M5zn instances are a general purpose instance, and feature a high frequency version of the 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors up to 4.5 GHz), along with up to 100 Gbps networking performance, and support for EFA. M5zn instances offer improved price performance compared to z1d.

Q: What are EC2 High Memory instances?

Amazon EC2 High Memory (U-1 and U7i) instances offer 3, 6, 8, 12, 16, 24, or 32 TiB of memory in a single instance. These instances are purpose built to run large in-memory databases business applications, including SAP deployments that rely on these databases.

EC2 High Memory (U-1) instances with 3 and 6 TiB are powered by Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8176M (Skylake) or 8280L (Cascade Lake) processors. 

Amazon EC2 U7i instances are powered by 1.9 GHz (Turbo Boost to 2.90 GHz) 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids) and support up to 1920 vCPUs. U7i instances are the first DDR5 memory based 8-socket offering by a leading cloud provider. U7inh instances are the first 32TB virtualized instance in cloud with SAP certification for standard sizing for both OLTP and OLAP workload.

Amazon EC2 High Memory instances offer up to 160Gbps of Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth for storage volumes including io2 Block Express to support IO-intensive use cases such as data hydration, backup/restore.

Q: Are High Memory instances certified by SAP to run SAP HANA workloads?

High Memory (U-1 and U7i) instances with 3, 6, 8, 12, 16, 24, 32 (U7inh) TiB of memory are certified by SAP for running Business Suite on HANA, the next-generation Business Suite S/4HANA, Data Mart Solutions on HANA, Business Warehouse on HANA, and SAP BW/4HANA in production environments. For details, see SAP's Certified and Supported SAP HANA Hardware Directory.

Q: What instance types are available for High Memory instances?

High Memory instances are available as both bare metal (U-1 only) and virtualized instances (U-1 and U7i), giving customers the choice to have direct access to the underlying hardware resources, or to take advantage of the additional flexibility that virtualized instances offer including On-Demand and 1-year and 3-year Savings Plan purchase options. Please check out available options for High Memory instances in the Memory optimized section of EC2 Instance types page.

Q: What are some of the benefits of using High Memory Virtualized instances over High Memory Bare Metal instances?

Benefits of High Memory virtual instances over High Memory Metal instances include – significantly better launch/reboot times, flexible purchase options (On-Demand, Savings Plan, Reserved Instances, Dedicated Hosts), choice of tenancy type, self-service options and support for a higher number of EBS volumes.

Q: When should a High Memory ‘Metal’ instance be used vs using High Memory ‘Virtualized’ instance?

Though High Memory ‘Virtualized’ instances are in-general recommended to be used, there are specific situations where only High Memory Metal instances can work. These situations include – when using OS versions that are not supported on High Memory Virtual instances OR when using applications that need to run in non-virtualized mode to meet licensing / support requirements OR when using applications that require access to hardware feature set (such as Intel VT-x) OR when using custom hypervisor (e.g, ESXi).

Q: How do I migrate from High Memory metal instances to High Memory virtualized instances?

You can migrate your High Memory metal instance to a virtualized instance in just few steps. 1/Stop your instance, 2/ Change the instance and tenancy type through EC2 API and 3/ Start your instance back up. If you are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP, you need to ensure that your operating system and kernel versions are compatible with virtualized High Memory instances. For further details, see Migrating SAP HANA on AWS to an EC2 High Memory Instance documentation.

Q: What are the storage options available with High Memory instances?

High Memory instances support Amazon EBS volumes for storage. High Memory instances are EBS-optimized by default.

Q: Which storage interface is supported on High Memory instances?

High Memory instances access EBS volumes via PCI attached NVM Express (NVMe) interfaces. EBS volumes attached to High Memory instances appear as NVMe devices. NVMe is an efficient and scalable storage interface, which is commonly used for flash based SSDs and provides latency reduction and results in increased disk I/O and throughput. The EBS volumes are attached and detached by PCI hotplug.

Q: What network performance is supported on High Memory instances?

High Memory instances use the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) for networking and enable Enhanced Networking by default. With ENA, High Memory instances can utilize up to 100 Gbps (U-1) and up to 200Gbps (U7i) of network bandwidth

Q: Can I run High Memory instances in my existing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)?

You can run High Memory instances in your existing and new Amazon VPCs.

Q: What is the underlying hypervisor on High Memory instances?

High Memory instances use the lightweight Nitro Hypervisor that is based on core KVM technology.

Q: Do High Memory instances enable CPU power management state control?

Yes. You can configure C-states and P-states on High Memory (U-1 metal) instances.  You can configure C-states on both U-1 and U7i virtual instances.   You can use C-states to enable higher turbo frequencies (as much as 4.0 GHz). You can also use P-states to lower performance variability by pinning all cores at P1 or higher P states, which is similar to disabling Turbo, and running consistently at the base CPU clock speed.

Q: What purchase options are available for High Memory instances?

EC2 High Memory virtualized instances are available for purchase via On-Demand, 1-Yr and 3-Yr Savings Plan, and 1-Yr and 3-Yr Reserved Instance. EC2 High Memory metal instances are only available for purchase as EC2 Dedicated Hosts on a 1-Yr and 3-Yr Reservation.

Q: What is the lifecycle of a Dedicated Host?

Once a Dedicated Host is allocated within your account, it will be standing by for your use. You can then launch an instance with a tenancy of "host" using the RunInstances API, and can also stop/start/terminate the instance through the API. You can use the AWS Management Console to manage the Dedicated Host and the instance. 

Q: Can I launch, stop/start, and terminate High Memory instances using AWS CLI/SDK?

You can launch, stop/start, and terminate instances using AWS CLI/SDK.

Q: Which AMIs are supported with High memory instances?

EBS-backed HVM AMIs with support for ENA networking can be used with High Memory instances. The latest Amazon Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server, and Windows Server AMIs are supported. Operating system support for SAP HANA workloads on High Memory instances include: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3 for SAP, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for SAP, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 for SAP, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP4 for SAP, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 for SAP, Red Had Enterprise Linux 7.6 for SAP. Refer to SAP on AWS Technical Documentation for the latest details on supported operating systems.

Q: Are there standard SAP HANA reference deployment frameworks available for the High Memory instance and the AWS Cloud?

You can use the AWS Quick Start reference SAP HANA deployments to rapidly deploy all the necessary SAP HANA building blocks on High Memory instances following SAP’s recommendations for high performance and reliability. AWS Quick Starts are modular and customizable, so you can layer additional functionality on top or modify them for your own implementations.

Q: Which