Tag Archives: Amazon EC2 Bare Metal

AWS Weekly Roundup — AWS Chips Taste Test, generative AI updates, Community Days, and more — April 1, 2024

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-aws-chips-taste-test-generative-ai-updates-community-days-and-more-april-1-2024/

Today is April Fool’s Day. About 10 years ago, some tech companies would joke about an idea that was thought to be fun and unfeasible on April 1st, to the delight of readers. Jeff Barr has also posted seemingly far-fetched ideas on this blog in the past, and some of these have surprisingly come true! Here are examples:

Year Joke Reality
2010 Introducing QC2 – the Quantum Compute Cloud, a production-ready quantum computer to solve certain types of math and logic problems with breathtaking speed. In 2019, we launched Amazon Braket, a fully managed service that allows scientists, researchers, and developers to begin experimenting with computers from multiple quantum hardware providers in a single place.
2011 Announcing AWS $NAME, a scalable event service to find and automatically integrate with your systems on the cloud, on premises, and even your house and room. In 2019, we introduced Amazon EventBridge to make it easy for you to integrate your own AWS applications with third-party applications. If you use AWS IoT Events, you can monitor and respond to events at scale from your IoT devices at home.
2012 New Amazon EC2 Fresh Servers to deliver a fresh (physical) EC2 server in 15 minutes using atmospheric delivery and communucation from a fleet of satellites. In 2021, we launched AWS Outposts Server, 1U/2U physical servers with built-in AWS services. In 2023, Project Kuiper completed successful tests of an optical mesh network in low Earth orbit. Now, we only need to develop satellite warehouse and atmospheric re-entry technology to follow Amazon PrimeAir’s drone delivery.
2013 PC2 – The New Punched Card Cloud, a new mf (mainframe) instance family, Mainframe Machine Images (MMI), tape storage, and punched card interfaces for mainframe computers used from the 1970s to ’80s. In 2022, we launched AWS Mainframe Modernization to help you modernize your mainframe applications and deploy them to AWS fully managed runtime environments.

Jeff returns! This year, we have AWS “Chips” Taste Test for him to indulge in, drawing unique parallels between chip flavors and silicon innovations. He compared the taste of “Golden Nacho Cheese,” “Al Chili Lime,” and “BBQ Training Wheels” with AWS Graviton, AWS Inferentia, and AWS Trainium chips.

What’s your favorite? Watch a fun video in the LinkedIn and X post of AWS social media channels.

Last week’s launches
If we stay curious, keep learning, and insist on high standards, we will continue to see more ideas turn into reality. The same goes for the generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) world. Here are some launches that utilize generative AI technology this week.

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock – Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet foundation model (FM) is now generally available on Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock to connect internal data sources for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock support metadata filtering, which improves retrieval accuracy by ensuring the documents are relevant to the query. You can narrow search results by specifying which documents to include or exclude from a query, resulting in more relevant responses generated by FMs such as Claude 3 Sonnet.

Finally, you can customize prompts and number of retrieval results in Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock. With custom prompts, you can tailor the prompt instructions by adding context, user input, or output indicator(s), for the model to generate responses that more closely match your use case needs. You can now control the amount of information needed to generate a final response by adjusting the number of retrieved passages. To learn more these new features, visit Knowledge bases for Amazon Bedrock in the AWS documentation.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens – At AWS re:Invent 2023, we previewed a generative AI capability to summarize long customer conversations into succinct, coherent, and context-rich contact summaries to help improve contact quality and agent performance. These generative AI–powered post-contact summaries are now available in Amazon Connect Contact Lens.

Amazon DataZone – At AWS re:Invent 2023, we also previewed a generative AI–based capability to generate comprehensive business data descriptions and context and include recommendations on analytical use cases. These generative AI–powered recommendations for descriptions are now available in Amazon DataZone.

There are also other important launches you shouldn’t miss:

A new Local Zone in Miami, Florida – AWS Local Zones are an AWS infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large populations, industry, and IT centers where no AWS Region exists. You can now use a new Local Zone in Miami, Florida, to run applications that require single-digit millisecond latency, such as real-time gaming, hybrid migrations, and live video streaming. Enable the new Local Zone in Miami (use1-mia2-az1) from the Zones tab in the Amazon EC2 console settings to get started.

New Amazon EC2 C7gn metal instance – You can use AWS Graviton based new C7gn bare metal instances to run applications that benefit from deep performance analysis tools, specialized workloads that require direct access to bare metal infrastructure, legacy workloads not supported in virtual environments, and licensing-restricted business-critical applications. The EC2 C7gn metal size comes with 64 vCPUs and 128 GiB of memory.

AWS Batch multi-container jobs – You can use multi-container jobs in AWS Batch, making it easier and faster to run large-scale simulations in areas like autonomous vehicles and robotics. With the ability to run multiple containers per job, you get the advanced scaling, scheduling, and cost optimization offered by AWS Batch, and you can use modular containers representing different components like 3D environments, robot sensors, or monitoring sidecars.

Amazon Guardduty EC2 Runtime Monitoring – We are announcing the general availability of Amazon GuardDuty EC2 Runtime Monitoring to expand threat detection coverage for EC2 instances at runtime and complement the anomaly detection that GuardDuty already provides by continuously monitoring VPC Flow Logs, DNS query logs, and AWS CloudTrail management events. You now have visibility into on-host, OS-level activities and container-level context into detected threats.

GitLab support for AWS CodeBuild – You can now use GitLab and GitLab self-managed as the source provider for your CodeBuild projects. You can initiate builds from changes in source code hosted in your GitLab repositories. To get started with CodeBuild’s new source providers, visit the AWS CodeBuild User Guide.

Retroactive support for AWS cost allocation tags – You can enable AWS cost allocation tags retroactively for up to 12 months. Previously, when you activated resource tags for cost allocation purposes, the tags only took effect prospectively. Submit a backfill request, specifying the duration of time you want the cost allocation tags to be backfilled. Once the backfill is complete, the cost and usage data from prior months will be tagged with the current cost allocation tags.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Some other updates and news about generative AI that you might have missed:

Amazon and Anthropic’s AI investiment – Read the latest milestone in our strategic collaboration and investment with Anthropic. Now, Anthropic is using AWS as its primary cloud provider and will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and future FM development. Earlier this month, we announced access to Anthropic’s most powerful FM, Claude 3, on Amazon Bedrock. We announced availability of Sonnet on March 4 and Haiku on March 13. To learn more, watch the video introducing Claude on Amazon Bedrock.

Virtual building assistant built on Amazon Bedrock – BrainBox AI announced the launch of ARIA (Artificial Responsive Intelligent Assistant) powered by Amazon Bedrock. ARIA is designed to enhance building efficiency by assimilating seamlessly into the day-to-day processes related to building management. To learn more, read the full customer story and watch the video on how to reduce a building’s CO2 footprint with ARIA.

Solar models available on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart – Upstage Solar is a large language model (LLM) 100 percent pre-trained with Amazon SageMaker that outperforms and uses its compact size and powerful track record to specialize in purpose training, making it versatile across languages, domains, and tasks. Now, Solar Mini is available on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. To learn more, watch how to deploy Solar models in SageMaker JumpStart.

AWS open source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open source newsletter in which he highlights new open source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community. Last week’s highlight was news that Linux Foundation launched Valkey community, an open source alternative to the Redis in-memory, NoSQL data store.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

AWS SummitAWS Summits – Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Paris (April 3), Amsterdam (April 9), Sydney (April 10–11), London (April 24), Berlin (May 15–16), and Seoul (May 16–17), Hong Kong (May 22), Milan (May 23), Dubai (May 29), Stockholm (June 4), and Madrid (June 5).

AWS re:Inforce – Explore cloud security in the age of generative AI at AWS re:Inforce, June 10–12 in Pennsylvania for two-and-a-half days of immersive cloud security learning designed to help drive your business initiatives. Read the story from AWS Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Chris Betz about a bit of what you can expect at re:Inforce.

AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Mumbai (April 6), Poland (April 11), Bay Area (April 12), Kenya (April 20), and Turkey (May 18).

You can browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events such as AWS DevDay.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Channy

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS.

Use New Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances to Build & Test Apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/use-amazon-ec2-m1-mac-instances-to-build-test-macos-ios-ipados-tvos-and-watchos-apps/

Last year at AWS re:Invent, Jeff Barr wrote about the exciting availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Mac instances. Today, we’re announcing the preview of a new EC2 M1 Mac instance.

The introduction of EC2 Mac instances brought the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. EC2 Mac instances are dedicated Mac mini computers attached through Thunderbolt to the AWS Nitro System, which lets the Mac mini appear and behave like another EC2 instance. It connects to your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), boot from Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, and leverage EBS snapshots, security groups and other AWS services. EC2 Mac instances let you scale your build and test fleets of Macs, paying as you go. There is no hypervisor involved, and you get full bare metal performance of the underlying Mac mini. An EC2 dedicated host reserves a Mac mini for your usage.

The availability (in preview) of EC2 M1 Mac instances lets you access machines built around the Apple-designed M1 System on Chip (SoC). If you are a Mac developer and re-architecting your apps to natively support Macs with Apple silicon, you may now build and test your apps and take advantage of all the benefits of AWS. Developers building for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV will also benefit from faster builds. EC2 M1 Mac instances deliver up to 60% better price performance over the x86-based EC2 Mac instances for iPhone and Mac app build workloads.

EC2 M1 Mac instances are powered by a combination of two hardware components:

  • The Mac mini, featuring M1 SoC with 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 16 GiB of memory, and a 16 core Apple Neural Engine.
  • The AWS Nitro System, providing up to 10 Gbps of VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of EBS storage bandwidth through a high-speed Thunderbolt connection.

How to Get Started
As I explained previously, when using EC2 Mac instances, there is no virtual machine involved. These are running on bare metal servers, each hosting a Mac mini. The first step, therefore, involves grabbing a dedicated server. I open the AWS Management Console, navigate to the Amazon EC2 section, then I select Dedicated Hosts. I select Allocate Dedicated Host to allocate a server to my AWS account.

EC2 Mac2 Instances - Dedicated Hosts

Alternatively, I may use the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).

➜  ~ aws ec2 allocate-hosts                  \
         --instance-type mac2.metal          \
         --availability-zone us-east-2b      \
         --quantity 1 
{
    "HostIds": [
        "h-0fxxxxxxx90"
    ]
}

Once the host is allocated, I start an EC2 instance on it. The procedure is no different from starting any EC2 instance type. I just have to ensure I select a macOS AMI version that suits my requirements. I select the mac2.metal instance type and select host Tenancy and the dedicated Host I just created.

EC2 Dedicated TenancyAlternatively, I may use the CLI.

➜ ~ aws ec2 run-instances                                     \
	    --instance-type mac2.metal                             \
        --key-name my_key                                      \
        --placement HostId=h-0fxxxxxxx90                       \
        --security-group-ids sg-01000000000000032              \
        --image-id AWS_OR_YOUR_AMI_ID
{
    "Groups": [],
    "Instances": [
        {
            "AmiLaunchIndex": 0,
            "ImageId": "ami-01xxxxbd",
            "InstanceId": "i-08xxxxx5c",
            "InstanceType": "mac2.metal",
            "KeyName": "my_key",
            "LaunchTime": "2021-11-08T16:47:39+00:00",
            "Monitoring": {
                "State": "disabled"
            },
... redacted for brevity ....

When you use EC2 Mac instances for the first time, you’re likely to ask questions such as, “How do I connect through Apple Remote Desktop?” or “How do I increase the size of the APFS file system on the EBS volume?” The EC2 Mac documentation covers the answers for you and provides examples of commands to run on macOS to perform these common tasks.

I use SSH to connect to the newly launched instance as usual.

EC2 Mac M1 Instance uname -a

I may enable Apple Remote Desktop and start a VNC session to the EC2 instance. The EC2 Mac instance documentation page has the details.

mac2 GUI VNC

Availability and Pricing
EC2 M1 Mac instances are now available in preview in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon), with other AWS Regions coming at launch.

Pricing metrics are similar to the previous generation of EC2 Mac instances. You are charged per hour of reservation of the dedicated host, not for the time the instance is running, and there is a minimum charge of 24 hours for reserving a dedicated host.

In the two preview Regions, the on-demand price is $0.6498 per hour. You can save up to 42 percent over the on-demand price with Savings Plans. Check our Dedicated Host on-demand pricing page, as well as the Savings Plans page to learn the details.

You can sign up for the preview of EC2 Mac M1 instances today!

— seb

New – Amazon EC2 R6i Memory-Optimized Instances Powered by the Latest Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors

Post Syndicated from Danilo Poccia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-ec2-r6i-memory-optimized-instances-powered-by-the-latest-generation-intel-xeon-scalable-processors/

In August, we introduced the general-purpose Amazon EC2 M6i instances powered by the latest generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz. Compute-optimized EC2 C6i instances were also made available last month.

Today, I am happy to share that we are expanding our sixth-generation x86-based offerings to include memory-optimized Amazon EC2 R6i instances.

Here’s a quick recap of the advantages of the new R6i instances compared to R5 instances:

  • A larger instance size (r6i.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 1,024 GiB of memory that makes it easier and more cost-efficient to consolidate workloads and scale up applications
  • Up to 15 percent improvement in compute price/performance
  • Up to 20 percent higher memory bandwidth
  • Up to 40 Gbps for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and 50 Gbps for networking which is 2x more than R5 instances
  • Always-on memory encryption.

R6i instances are SAP Certified and are an ideal fit for memory-intensive workloads such as SQL and NoSQL databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches like Memcached and Redis, in-memory databases, and real-time big data analytics like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark clusters.

Compared to M6i and C6i instances, the only difference is in the amount of memory that is included per vCPU. R6i instances are available in ten sizes:

Name vCPUs Memory
(GiB)		 Network Bandwidth
(Gbps)		 EBS Throughput
(Gbps)
r6i.large 2 16 Up to 12.5 Up to 10
r6i.xlarge 4 32 Up to 12.5 Up to 10
r6i.2xlarge 8 64 Up to 12.5 Up to 10
r6i.4xlarge 16 128 Up to 12.5 Up to 10
r6i.8xlarge 32 256 12.5 10
r6i.12xlarge 48 384 18.75 15
r6i.16xlarge 64 512 25 20
r6i.24xlarge 96 768 37.5 30
r6i.32xlarge 128 1024 50 40
r6i.metal 128 1024 50 40

Like M6i and C6i instances, these new R6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, which is a collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware, delivering high performance, high availability, and highly secure cloud instances.

As with all sixth generation EC2 instances, you may need to upgrade your Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) for optimal networking performance. For more information, see this article about migrating an EC2 instance to a sixth-generation instance in the AWS Knowledge Center.

R6i instances support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) on r6i.32xlarge and r6i.metal instances for workloads that benefit from lower network latency, such as HPC and video processing.

Availability and Pricing
EC2 R6i instances are available today in four AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), Europe (Ireland). As usual with EC2, you pay for what you use. For more information, see the EC2 pricing page.

— Danilo

New – Amazon EC2 R5b Instances Provide 3x Higher EBS Performance

Post Syndicated from Harunobu Kameda original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-ec2-r5b-instances-providing-3x-higher-ebs-performance/

In July 2018, we announced memory-optimized R5 instances for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). R5 instances are designed for memory-intensive applications such as high-performance databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches, in-memory databases, real time big data analytics, and other enterprise applications.

R5 instances offer two different block storage options. R5d instances offer up to 3.6TB of NMVe instance storage for applications that need access to high-speed, low latency local storage. In addition, all R5b instances work with Amazon Elastic Block Store. Amazon EBS is an easy-to-use, high-performance and highly available block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 for both throughput- and transaction-intensive workloads at any scale. A broad range of workloads, such as relational and non-relational databases, enterprise applications, containerized applications, big data analytics engines, file systems, and media workflows are widely deployed on Amazon EBS.

Today, we are happy to announce the availability of R5b, a new addition to the R5 instance family. The new R5b instance is powered by the AWS Nitro System to provide the best network-attached storage performance available on EC2. This new instance offers up to 60Gbps of EBS bandwidth and 260,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS).

Amazon EC2 R5b Instance
Many customers use R5 instances with EBS for large relational database workloads such as commerce platforms, ERP systems, and health record systems, and they rely on EBS to provide scalable, durable, and high availability block storage. These instances provide sufficient storage performance for many use cases, but some customers require higher EBS performance on EC2.

R5 instances provide bandwidth up to 19Gbps and maximum EBS performance of 80K IOPS, while the new R5b instances support bandwidth up to 60Gbps and EBS performance of 260K IOPS, providing 3x higher EBS-Optimized performance compared to R5 instances, enabling customers to lift and shift large relational databases applications to AWS. R5b and R5 vCPU to memory ratio and network performance are the same.

Instance Name vCPUs Memory EBS Optimized Bandwidth (Mbps) EBS Optimized IOPs@16KiB (IO/s)
r5b.large 2 16 GiB Up to 10,000 Up to 43,333
r5b.xlarge 4 32 GiB Up to 10,000 Up to 43,333
r5b.2xlarge 8 64 GiB Up to 10,000 Up to 43,333
r5b.4xlarge 16 128 GiB 10,000 43,333
r5b.8xlarge 32 256 GiB 20,000 86,667
r5b.12xlarge 48 384 GiB 30,000 130,000
r5b.16xlarge 64 512 GiB 40,000 173,333
r5b.24xlarge 96 768 GiB 60,000 260,000
r5b.metal 96 768 GiB 60,000 260,000

Customers operating storage performance sensitive workloads can migrate from R5 to R5b to consolidate their existing workloads into fewer or smaller instances. This can reduce the cost of both infrastructure and licensed commercial software working on those instances. R5b instances are supported by Amazon RDS for Oracle and Amazon RDS for SQL Server, simplifying the migration path for large commercial database applications and improving storage performance for current RDS customers by up to 3x.

All Nitro compatible AMIs support R5b instances, and the EBS-backed HVM AMI must have NVMe 1.0e and ENA drivers installed at R5b instance launch. R5b supports io1, io2 Block Express (in preview), gp2, gp3, sc1, st1 and standard volumes. R5b does not support io2 volumes and io1 volumes that have multi-attach enabled, which are coming soon.

Available Today

R5b instances are available in the following regions: US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Europe (Frankfurt). RDS on r5b is available in US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Europe (Frankfurt), and support in other regions is coming soon.

Learn more about EC2 R5 instances and get started with Amazon EC2 today.

– Kame;