Amazon Cloud Services: New Elastic Compute Cloud for Apps Needing Low Latency Access to High-Speed SSD Storage

Amazon Web Services a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), for applications requiring low latency access to high-speed storage with the High I/O instances. (Photo : Amazon)

Amazon Web Services a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), for applications requiring low latency access to high-speed storage with the High I/O instances.

The new instances are supported by solid-state disks, or SSDs, and capable of delivering more than 120,000 read input and output (IOPS) and over 80,000 write IOPS. The new instances make it better for transaction processing, mobile and streaming applications that are typically requiring low latency access to storage systems that can handle "tens of thousands" of IOPS, and time series analysis.

Like Us on Facebook

The High I/O instances give users the ability to run demanding data-driven application on the Amazon EC2 without making "expensive up-front capital investments," says a statement by Amazon Web Services.

"With the launch of High I/O instances, customers can take advantage of SSD-based instances to run their most demanding applications on AWS, whether it's running databases that support high-transaction enterprise applications or powering massively popular social, mobile or gaming apps for consumers," said Amazon EC2 Vice President Peter De Santis. "These new instances are a more efficient and cost effective way to run high I/O applications and another example of our roadmap being shaped by our customers--as this has been a top request from customers over the last few months."

Tom Brewster of Tech Week Europe commented, "It appears Amazon is attempting to attract sectors traditionally fearful of using the public cloud for critical applications, such as financial services. That's why it has listed transaction processing as one of the operations this High I/O instance service is ideal for."

According to Amazon Web Services, customers can launch High I/O instances using the AWS console, Amazon EC2 command line interface, AWS SDKs, and third party libraries.

One of Amazon Web Services' collaborators, Netflix, can be affected by the development, in a positive way.

"We currently run a high performance Cassandra infrastructure on Amazon EC2 using high memory instances," said Netflix's Director for Architecture Adrian Cockcroft. "The ability to leverage SSD-backed instances which provide tens of thousands of IOPS will significantly increase the performance of our Cassandra clusters and overall service capability."

High I/O instances can be purchased as On-demand and Reserved instances. According to V3's Daniel Robinson, the High I/O instances are initially available as Quadruple Extra Large configuration, comprising eight virtual cores with 60.5 GB of memory and two SSD-based volumes each with 1TB storage with prices starting at $3.10 per hour.