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Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 I4i Instances

High local storage performance

Why Amazon EC2 I4i Instances?

Amazon EC2 I4i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and feature up to 30 TB of local AWS Nitro SSD storage. Nitro SSDs are NVMe-based and custom-designed by AWS to provide high I/O performance, low latency, minimal latency variability, and security with always-on encryption. I4i instances deliver up to 30% better compute price performance, 60% lower storage I/O latency, and 75% lower storage I/O latency variability compared to I3 instances.

These instances are a great fit for databases such as MySQL, Oracle DB, and Microsoft SQL Server, and NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Couchbase, Aerospike, and Redis where low latency local NVMe storage is needed in order to meet application service level agreements (SLAs).

Benefits

I4i instances deliver up to 30% better compute price performance than I3 instances. I4i instances also offer a new size with up to 128 vCPUs and 1,024 GiB of memory, which is twice the size of the largest I3 instance. The higher instance size lets you to consolidate workloads on fewer instances and save on per core licensing costs.

While some SSD-based instances are created to achieve high results for benchmark tests that may not represent real workloads, I4i instances are designed to increase the number of transactions that can be processed per second (TPS). This allows you to meet or exceed application service level agreements (SLAs) and deliver higher performance to end-users.

I4i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances for better overall performance and security.

Features

I4i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, and include support for always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME).  

I4i instances support 40 Gbps bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) in the largest size and up to 10 Gbps in the four smallest sizes, which is twice that of I3 instances. I4i instances also support up to 75 Gbps networking bandwidth, which is three times more than I3 instances.

The AWS Nitro System is a rich collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware and software to deliver high performance, high availability, and high security while also reducing virtualization overhead.

Featuring AWS Nitro SSDs

AWS Nitro SSDs build on AWS’s silicon innovation with the AWS Nitro System and are custom-designed to deliver the best storage performance for your I/O intensive workloads running in Amazon EC2. Traditionally, SSDs maximize the peak read and write I/O performance. AWS Nitro SSDs are architected to minimize latency and latency variability of I/O intensive workloads, such as SQL and NoSQL databases, search engines, distributed file systems, and data analytics which continuously read and write from the SSDs in a sustained manner, for fast and more predictable performance. AWS Nitro SSDs deliver up to 60% lower storage I/O latency and up to 75% reduced storage I/O latency variability compared to third generation EC2 storage optimized instances. Data on the AWS Nitro SSDs is always encrypted using ephemeral keys. AWS Nitro SSDs also enable AWS to innovate faster by providing firmware updates at cloud scale and speed. AWS Nitro SSDs support Torn Write Prevention (TWP), which improves database performance and service level agreements (SLAs) without compromising data resiliencies, for workloads using MySQL and MariaDB database.

Product Details

Instance Size
vCPU
Memory (GiB)
Instance Storage (GB)
Network Bandwidth (Gbps)
EBS Bandwidth (Gbps)
i4i.large
2
16
1 x 468 AWS Nitro SSD
Up to 10
Up to 10
i4i.xlarge
4
32
1 x 937 AWS Nitro SSD
Up to 10
Up to 10
i4i.2xlarge
8
64
1 x 1,875 AWS Nitro SSD
Up to 12
Up to 10
i4i.4xlarge
16
128
1 x 3,750 AWS Nitro SSD
Up to 25
Up to 10
i4i.8xlarge
32
256
2 x 3,750 AWS Nitro SSD
18.75
10
i4i.12xlarge
48
384
3 x 3,750 AWS Nitro SSD
28.12
15
i4i.16xlarge
64
512
4 x 3,750 AWS Nitro SSD
37.5
20
i4i.24xlarge
96
768
6 x 3,750 AWS Nitro SSD
56.25
30
i4i.32xlarge
128
1,024
8 x 3,750 AWS Nitro SSD
75
40
i4i.metal
128
1,024
8 x 3,750 AWS Nitro SSD
75
40

Customer testimonials

Here are some examples of how customers and partners have achieved their business agility, price performance, cost savings, and sustainability goals with Amazon EC2 I4i instances.

Anthropic

 

"Anthropic’s mission is to develop safe and capable artificial intelligence. A critical part of this process is preparing the massive datasets needed to train our state-of-the-art language models - a task that requires high-performance storage and compute capabilities. We’ve found that Amazon EC2 i4i instances, with their combination of local NVMe storage (up to 30 TB of Nitro SSD) and powerful compute, are uniquely suited to handle our data preparation and experimentation workloads. The high I/O performance, security, and scalability of i4i have allowed us to iterate faster and more efficiently, ultimately accelerating our progress in AI research and development."
 
Jennifer Zhou, Member of Technical Staff - Anthropic
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Indeed

 

Indeed is the #1 job site in the world with over 350M+ unique visitors every month. Indeed utilizes AWS for various purposes including computing, storage, analytics, and database management to meet their scaling demands.
 
"Indeed continuously incorporates many of AWS' latest innovations and solutions. Indeed frequently uses distributed databases, and scan times of those databases are extremely important. Indeed migrated from Amazon EC2 r6i.4xlarge instances to Amazon EC2 i4i.32xlarge instances. By migrating their instances, Indeed saw a 97% performance gain with scan time dropping from a high of 24.25 seconds to 0.65 seconds. Indeed is looking forward to future innovations from AWS, with a continued partnership and reliance on AWS's services for Indeed’s operations."
 
Dennis Latka, Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Indeed
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Redis

 

Redis Enterprise powers mission-critical apps and services for over 8,000 organizations globally by enabling software teams to create a high-performance data layer for the real-time world. 
 
"We are thrilled with the performance we are seeing from the Amazon EC2 I4i instances which use the new low latency AWS Nitro SSDs. Our testing shows I4i instances delivering an astonishing 2.9x higher query throughput than the previous generation I3 instances. We have also tested with various read and write mixes, and observed consistent and linearly scaling performance." 
 
Yiftach Shoolman, Co-Founder and CTO - Redis
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ScyllaDB

 

ScyllaDB is a high-performance NoSQL database that can take advantage of high performance cloud computing instances. 
 
"When we tested I4i instances, we observed up to 2.7x increase in throughput per vCPU compared to I3 instances for reads. With an even mix of reads and writes, we observed 2.2x higher throughput per vCPU, with a 40% reduction in average latency than I3 instances. We are excited for the incredible performance and value these new instances will enable for our customers going forward." 
 
Avi Kivity, Co-Founder and CTO - ScyllaDB
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Amazon Quicksight

 

"I4i instances have demonstrated superior performance over previous generation I3 instances, with a 30% improvement across operations. We look forward to using I4i to further elevate performance for our customers." 
 
Tracy Daugherty, General Manager - Amazon QuickSight
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Aerospike

 

"Aerospike running on EC2 I3en instances already delivers industry leading real-time performance for read/write workloads. With EC2 I4i instances, we have observed a 70% increase in performance on read workloads alone. This combined with the proven ability of Aerospike to deliver high throughput of writes means Aerospike running on I4i instances will deliver the best price/performance in the industry for real-time access to petabytes of data running on EC2."
 
Srini Srinivasan, CTO and Founder - Aerospike
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