At Amazon’s re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas, the company’s CTO Werner Vogels announced a new instance type for applications that need high I/O performance. As Vogels noted, the company’s customers have long asked for instances with higher and guaranteed I/O performance and these new I2 instances can develop up to 350k read IOPS and 320k write IOPS.
These new instances are essentially the next generation of Amazon’s storage-optimized HI1 instances. At the high end, though, these older instances only offered up to 120,000 random read IOPS.
Just like Amazon’s other instance types, the I2 instances will also come in a number of different sizes, but all of them will rely on SSD storage, starting with a 360GB SSD for the i2.large instance up to eight 720GB SSD for the new i2.x8large instance.
As Vogels noted in his keynote today, magnetic disks are becoming the new tape. To deliver the high performance that most users now expect, developers continue to move away from hard disks and to SSDs and applications that run in-memory. Because of this, memory is now “the new disk.”
