New Compute-Optimized EC2 Instances

[tcas]

Interesting they got a custom processor revision for them that isn't on Intel's ARK: Xeon E5-2666 v3

I wonder what volumes Amazon buys in order to get Intel to make a custom part number for them. Do they design their own servers?

[pzb]

Yes. https://twitter.com/bernardgolden/status/532700076494184448 has a picture of slide from re:Invent where we talk about custom servers and storage. The whole slide deck should be online in a few days.

[wmf]

It's interesting that Amazon is putting almost no RAM in their servers. I find that 16GB/core maximizes GB/$ but they're using 4GB/core.

[astrodust]

These are compute-optimized. They have others with more memory if that's your requirement.

Their current memory-optimized models go up to 244GB.

[brianwawok]

Totally depends on workload. Some workloads you can max CPU with 256 MB / core. Some workloads you will never max CPU before you run out of ram.

[api]

I'd really like to see a more a-la-carte option. For example: I have an app that might in the future require a lot of network, a decent but not terribly huge amount of CPU, but very little memory or storage. I'd like to be able to provision an instance with, say, 512MB RAM, 2GB disk, 10 gigabit Ethernet, and CPU optimized for single-threaded performance with only 2-4 cores. Amazon and most other large cloud providers seem to assume that demand for everything increases together, which doesn't apply to every work load.

[joshdev]

That's where I think containers come in handy. Assuming you have other services you are managing you can pack them into instances running your main workload. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/cloud-container-management/ will likely make that very easy to manage, assuming you are willing to go all in with Amazon.

[notastartup]

60gb of ram...