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InfoQ Homepage News AWS Introduces New Compute-Optimized Amazon EC2 C6a Instances Providing Better Price-Performance

Cloud Improve Developer Experience by Optimizing Java Environments (Webinar Dec 4th) AWS Introduces New Compute-Optimized Amazon EC2 C6a Instances Providing Better Price-Performance

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Feb 18, 2022 2 min read

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• Steef-Jan Wiggers

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Recently, AWS introduced new compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C6a instances that provide up to 15 percent improvement in price-performance versus C5a instances and 10 percent lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances. These new instances are ideal for running compute-intensive workloads such as high-performance web servers, batch processing, ad serving, machine learning, multi-player gaming, video encoding, high-performance computing (HPC) such as scientific modeling, and machine learning.

The Amazon EC2 C6a is the next set of instances after the compute-optimized C6i instances. These compute-optimized instances like C6i offer up to 15 percent better prices performance, up to 40 Gbps for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and up to 50 Gbps for network bandwidth versus the C5(a) instances. Furthermore, C6a instances are powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC Processors and built on the AWS Nitro System.

Channy Yun, a principal developer advocate at AWS, tweeted:

With the launch of #C6a instances, there are now officially more than 500 #AmazonEC2 instances for customers to choose from!

C6a instances provide ten new instance sizes to meet customer demands for increased scalability, the largest with 192 vCPUs and 384 GiB of memory, twice the size of the largest C5a instances. Furthermore, to increase instance security, C6a instances have always-on memory encryption with AMD Transparent Single Key Memory Encryption (TSME) and support new AVX2 instructions for accelerating encryption and decryption algorithms.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/c6a/

With regards to performance, a respondent on a Reddit thread stated the following about the new C6a instances :

I converted a handful of C6i to C6a this morning to compare. They're just running a PHP web app, so I can't speak to all workloads, but they're about as performant as c6i for a tiny bit less money.

Other public cloud providers such as Azure and Google Cloud also offer a wide selection of instance types, varying combinations of storage, CPU, memory, and networking capacity, allowing customers to scale resources to the requirements of their target workload.

For compute-intensive workloads, Microsoft for example offers the Fsv2-series runs on 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8272CL (Cascade Lake) processors and Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 (Skylake) processors, and the FX-series runs on the Intel Xeon Gold 6246R (Cascade Lake) processors.

Currently, C6a instances are available in three AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland). Pricing details are available on the EC2 pricing page.

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Steef-Jan Wiggers

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Related Topics:

• Development
• Architecture & Design
• DevOps
• EC2
• AWS
• Amazon
• IaaS
• Performance
• Amazon Web Services
• Cloud Computing
• Cloud

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