Amazon today announced a massive new instance type for its AWS EC2 compute service. The new X1 instances will feature 2 terabytes of memory. That’s a huge increase from what was previously EC2’s largest instance type, which “only” featured 200 gigabytes of memory. These new instances will launch in the first half of next year.
As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels noted in today’s keynote, this will make it easier for AWS users to do in-memory processing with tools like SAP Hana, Microsoft SQL Server, Apache Spark, and Presto. The new instances will be powered by Intel Xeon E7 processors.
Amazon did not disclose pricing today, but said it would provide this information at launch time
In addition to this new memory-centric instance, Amazon will also soon launch a new nano instance — t2.nano. This one will make use of Amazon’s recently introduce burstable mode for small EC2 instances. By default, you’ll get one virtual CPU and 512 MB of memory. You will get full core performance for about an hour on a full credit balance. If you don’t need 100 percent of your processor performance, you’ll get credit for that, but credits expire after 24 hours.
