AWS News Blog
Now Available – I3 Instances for Demanding, I/O Intensive Applications
On the first day of AWS re:Invent I published an EC2 Instance Update and promised to share additional information with you as soon as I had it.
Today I am happy to be able to let you know that we are making six sizes of our new I3 instances available in fifteen AWS regions! Designed for I/O intensive workloads and equipped with super-efficient NVMe SSD storage, these instances can deliver up to 3.3 million IOPS at a 4 KB block and up to 16 GB/second of sequential disk throughput. This makes them a great fit for any workload that requires high throughput and low latency including relational databases, NoSQL databases, search engines, data warehouses, real-time analytics, and disk-based caches. When compared to the I2 instances, I3 instances deliver storage that is less expensive and more dense, with the ability to deliver substantially more IOPS and more network bandwidth per CPU core.
The Specs
Here are the instance sizes and the associated specs:
| Instance Name | vCPU Count | Memory |
Instance Storage (NVMe SSD) | Price/Hour |
| i3.large | 2 | 15.25 GiB | 0.475 TB | $0.15 |
| i3.xlarge | 4 | 30.5 GiB | 0.950 TB | $0.31 |
| i3.2xlarge | 8 | 61 GiB | 1.9 TB | $0.62 |
| i3.4xlarge | 16 | 122 GiB | 3.8 TB (2 disks) | $1.25 |
| i3.8xlarge | 32 | 244 GiB | 7.6 TB (4 disks) | $2.50 |
| i3.16xlarge | 64 | 488 GiB | 15.2 TB (8 disks) | $4.99 |
The prices shown are for On-Demand instances in the US East (N. Virginia) Region; see the EC2 pricing page for more information.
I3 instances are available in On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot form in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), US East (Ohio), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. You can also use them as Dedicated Hosts and as Dedicated Instances.
These instances support Hardware Virtualization (HVM) AMIs only, and must be run within a Virtual Private Cloud. In order to benefit from the performance made possible by the NVMe storage, you must run one of the following operating systems:
- Amazon Linux AMI
- CentOS – 7.0 or better
- Ubuntu – 16.04 or 16.10
- SUSE 12
- SUSE 11 with SP3
- Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2, and 2016
The I3 instances offer up to 8 NVMe SSDs. In order to achieve the best possible throughput and to get as many IOPS as possible, you can stripe multiple volumes together, or spread the I/O workload across them in another way.
Each vCPU (Virtual CPU) is a hardware hyperthread on an Intel E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) processor running at 2.3 GHz. The processor supports the AVX2 instructions, along with Turbo Boost and NUMA.
Go For Launch
The I3 instances are available today in fifteen AWS regions and you can start to use them right now.
— Jeff;