Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-m5zn-instances-fastest-intel-xeon-scalable-cpu-in-the-cloud/

We launched the compute-intensive z1d instances in mid-2018 for customers who asked us for extremely high per-core performance and a high memory-to-core ratio to power their front-end Electronic Design Automation (EDA), actuarial, and CPU-bound relational database workloads.

In order to address a complementary set of use cases, customers have asked us for an EC2 instance that will give them high per-core performance like z1d, with no local NVMe storage, higher networking throughput, and a reduced memory-to-vCPU ratio. They have indicated if we built an instance with this set of attributes, it would be an excellent fit for workloads such as gaming, financial applications, simulation modeling applications such as those used in the automobile, aerospace, energy and telecommunication industries, and High Performance Computing (HPC).

Introducing M5zn
Building on the success of the z1d instances, we are launching M5zn instances in seven sizes today. These instances use 2nd generation custom Intel^® Xeon^® Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors with a sustained all-core turbo clock frequency of up to 4.5 GHz. M5zn instances feature high frequency processing, are a variant of the general-purpose M5 instances, and are built on the AWS Nitro System. These instances also feature low latency 100 Gbps networking and the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), in order to improve performance for HPC and communication-intensive applications.

Here are the M5zn instances (all VPC-only, HVM-only, and EBS-Optimized, with support for Optimize vCPU). As you can see, the memory-to-vCPU ratio on these instances is half that of the existing z1d instances:

The Nitro Hypervisor allows M5zn instances to deliver performance that is just about indistinguishable from bare metal. Other AWS Nitro System components such as the Nitro Security Chip and hardware-based processing for EBS increase performance, while VPC encryption provides greater security.

Things To Know
Here are a couple of “fun facts” about the M5zn instances:

Placement Groups – M5zn instances can be used in Cluster (for low latency and high network throughput), Spread (to keep critical instances separate from each other), and Partition (to reduce correlated failures) placement groups.

Networking – M5zn instances support the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) with dedicated 100 Gbps network connections and a dedicated 19 Gbps connection to EBS. If you are building distributed ML or HPC applications for use on a cluster of M5zn instances, be sure to take a look at the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA). Your HPC applications can use the Message Passing Interface (MPI) to communicate efficiently at high speed while scaling to thousands of nodes.

C-State Control – You can configure CPU Power Management on m5zn.6xlarge and m5zn.12xlarge instances. This is definitely an advanced feature, but one worth exploring in those situations where you need to squeeze every possible cycle of available performance from the instance.

NUMA – You can make use of Non-Uniform Memory Access on m5zn.12xlarge instances. This is also an advanced feature, but worth exploring in situations where you have an in-depth understanding of your application’s memory access patterns.

To learn more about these and other features, visit the EC2 M5 Instances page.

Available Now
As you can see, the M5zn instances are a great fit for gaming, HPC and simulation modeling workloads such as those used by the financial, automobile, aerospace, energy, and telecommunications industries.

You can launch M5zn instances today in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions in On-Demand, Reserved Instance, Savings Plan, and Spot form. Dedicated Instances and Dedicated Hosts are also available.

Support is available in the EC2 Forum or via your usual AWS Support contact. The EC2 team is interested in your feedback and you can contact them at [email protected].

— Jeff;

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-update-d3-d3en-dense-storage-instances/

We have launched several generations of EC2 instances with dense storage including the HS1 in 2012 and the D2 in 2015. As you can guess from the name, our customers use these instances when they need massive amounts of very economical on-instance storage for their data warehouses, data lakes, network file systems, Hadoop clusters, and the like. These workloads demand plenty of I/O and network throughput, but work fine with a high ratio of storage to compute power.

New D3 and D3en Instances
Today we are launching the D3 and D3en instances. Like their predecessors, they give you access to massive amounts of low-cost on-instance HDD storage. The D3 instances are available in four sizes, with up to 32 vCPUs and 48 TB of storage. Here are the specs:

As you can see from the table above, the D3 instances are available in the same configurations as the D2 instances for easy migration. You’ll get 5% more memory per vCPU, a 30% boost in compute power, and 2.5x higher network performance if you migrate from D2 to D3. The instances provide low-cost dense storage that delivers high performance sequential access to large data sets. They are perfect for distributed file systems such as HDFS and MapR FS, big data analytical workloads, data warehouses, log processing, and data processing.

The D3en instances are available in six sizes, with up to 48 vCPUs and 336 TB of storage. Here are the specs:

The D3en instances have a high ratio of storage to vCPU, and are optimized for high throughput and high sequential I/O to very large data sets, with a cost-per-TB that is 80% lower than on D2 instances. D3en instances can host Lustre, BeeGFS, GPFS, and other distributed file systems, they can store your data lakes, and they can run your Amazon EMR, Spark, and Hadoop analytical workloads.

Both of the instance types are built on the AWS Nitro System and are powered by custom Intel^® Second Generation Scalable Xeon^® (Cascade Lake) processors that can deliver all-core turbo performance of up to 3.1 GHz. The HDD storage is encrypted at rest using AES-256-XTS; traffic between D3 or D3en instances in the same VPC or within peered VPCs is encrypted using a 256-bit key.

Things to Know
Here are a couple of things that you should keep in mind regarding the D3 and D3en instances:

Regions – D3en instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) Regions; D3en instances are available in all of those regions and also in the US East (Ohio) Region, with more regions coming soon.

Purchase Options – You can purchase D3 and D3 instances in On-Demand, Savings Plan, Reserved Instance, Spot, and Dedicated Instance form.

AMIs – You must use AMIs that include the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and NVMe drivers.

Now Available
D3 and D3en instances are available now and you can start using them today!

— Jeff;

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-use-mac-instances-to-build-test-macos-ios-ipados-tvos-and-watchos-apps/

Throughout the course of my career I have done my best to stay on top of new hardware and software. As a teenager I owned an Altair 8800 and an Apple II. In my first year of college someone gave me a phone number and said “call this with modem.” I did, it answered “PENTAGON TIP,” and I had access to ARPANET!

I followed the emerging PC industry with great interest, voraciously reading every new issue of Byte, InfoWorld, and several other long-gone publications. In early 1983, rumor had it that Apple Computer would soon introduce a new system that was affordable, compact, self-contained, and very easy to use. Steve Jobs unveiled the Macintosh in January 1984 and my employer ordered several right away, along with a pair of the Apple Lisa systems that were used as cross-development hosts. As a developer, I was attracted to the Mac’s rich collection of built-in APIs and services, and still treasure my phone book edition of the Inside Macintosh documentation!

New Mac Instance
Over the last couple of years, AWS users have told us that they want to be able to run macOS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). We’ve asked a lot of questions to learn more about their needs, and today I am pleased to introduce you to the new Mac instance!

The original (128 KB) Mac

Powered by Mac mini hardware and the AWS Nitro System, you can use Amazon EC2 Mac instances to build, test, package, and sign Xcode applications for the Apple platform including macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Safari. The instances feature an 8th generation, 6-core Intel Core i7 (Coffee Lake) processor running at 3.2 GHz, with Turbo Boost up to 4.6 GHz. There’s 32 GiB of memory and access to other AWS services including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS Systems Manager, and so forth.

On the networking side, the instances run in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and include ENA networking with up to 10 Gbps of throughput. With EBS-Optimization, and the ability to deliver up to 55,000 IOPS (16KB block size) and 8 Gbps of throughput for data transfer, EBS volumes attached to the instances can deliver the performance needed to support I/O-intensive build operations.

Mac instances run macOS 10.14 (Mojave) and 10.15 (Catalina) and can be accessed via command line (SSH) or remote desktop (VNC). The AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) for EC2 Mac instances are EC2-optimized and include the AWS goodies that you would find on other AWS AMIs: An ENA driver, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), the CloudWatch Agent, CloudFormation Helper Scripts, support for AWS Systems Manager, and the ec2-user account. You can use these AMIs as-is, or you can install your own packages and create custom AMIs (the homebrew-aws repo contains the additional packages and documentation on how to do this).

You can use these instances to create build farms, render farms, and CI/CD farms that target all of the Apple environments that I mentioned earlier. You can provision new instances in minutes, giving you the ability to quickly & cost-effectively build code for multiple targets without having to own & operate your own hardware. You pay only for what you use, and you get to benefit from the elasticity, scalability, security, and reliability provided by EC2.

EC2 Mac Instances in Action
As always, I asked the EC2 team for access to an instance in order to put it through its paces. The instances are available in Dedicated Host form, so I started by allocating a host:

$ aws ec2 allocate-hosts --instance-type mac1.metal \
  --availability-zone us-east-1a --auto-placement on \
  --quantity 1 --region us-east-1

Then I launched my Mac instance from the command line (console, API, and CloudFormation can also be used):

$ aws ec2 run-instances --region us-east-1 \
  --instance-type mac1.metal \
  --image-id  ami-023f74f1accd0b25b \
  --key-name keys-jbarr-us-east  --associate-public-ip-address

I took Luna for a very quick walk, and returned to find that my instance was ready to go. I used the console to give it an appropriate name:

Then I connected to my instance:

From here I can install my development tools, clone my code onto the instance, and initiate my builds.

I can also start a VNC server on the instance and use a VNC client to connect to it:

Note that the VNC protocol is not considered secure, and this feature should be used with care. I used a security group that allowed access only from my desktop’s IP address:

I can also tunnel the VNC traffic over SSH; this is more secure and would not require me to open up port 5900.

Things to Know
Here are a couple of fast-facts about the Mac instances:

AMI Updates – We expect to make new AMIs available each time Apple releases major or minor versions of each supported OS. We also plan to produce AMIs with updated Amazon packages every quarter.

Dedicated Hosts – The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours. This is largely transparent to you, but it does mean that the instances cannot be used as part of an Auto Scaling Group.

Purchase Models – You can run Mac instances On-Demand and you can also purchase a Savings Plan.

Apple M1 Chip – EC2 Mac instances with the Apple M1 chip are already in the works, and planned for 2021.

Launch one Today
You can start using Mac instances in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions today, and check out this video for more information!

— Jeff;

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-nitro-enclaves-isolated-ec2-environments-to-process-confidential-data/

When I first told you about the AWS Nitro System, I said: The Nitro system is a rich collection of building blocks that can be assembled in many different ways, giving us the flexibility to design and rapidly deliver EC2 instance types with an ever-broadening selection of compute, storage, memory, and networking options. To date, […]