New – Amazon EC2 M6id and C6id Instances with Up to 7.6 TB Local NVMe Storage

Last year, we launched the Amazon EC2 M6i instances and C6i instances, our sixth-generation offerings that include 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

Today we are expanding Amazon EC2 M6id and C6id instances, backed by NVMe-based SSD block-level instance storage physically connected to the host server. These instances are powered by the Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, equipped with up to 7.6 TB of local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage, and deliver up to 15 percent better price performance compared to previous generation instances.

M6id instances are ideal for workloads that require a balance of compute and memory resources along with high-speed, low-latency local block storage, including data logging and media processing. C6id is ideal for compute-intensive workloads, including those that need access to high-speed, low-latency local storage like video encoding, image manipulation, and other forms of media processing. Both M6id and C6id will also benefit applications that need temporary storage of data, such as batch and log processing and applications that need caches and scratch files.

Compared to previous generation instances, new instance types provide:

• Up to 58 percent higher storage per vCPU and 34 percent lower cost per TB compared to M5d instances, and up to 138 percent higher storage per vCPU and 56 percent lower cost per TB compared with C5d instances.
• Larger instance sizes (32xlarge) with up to 128 vCPUs and 512 GiB (M6id) or 256 GiB (C6id) of memory that make it easier and more cost-efficient to consolidate workloads and scale up applications.
• Up to 15 percent improvement in compute price performance and 20 percent higher memory bandwidth.
• 2 times increased bandwidth up to 40 Gbps for Amazon EBS and 50 Gbps for networking.

Here are the specs of M6id instances in detail:

Here are also the specs of C6id instances in detail:

You can use any Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that include drivers for the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and NVMe. For optimal networking performance on these new instances, ENA driver update may be required. For more information on optimal ENA driver for M6id and C6id instances, see this article on migrating instances.

Here are a couple of things to remind you about the local NVMe storage on these instances:

• You don’t have to specify a block device mapping in your AMI or during the instance launch; the local storage will show up as one or more devices (/dev/nvme*1 on Linux) after the guest operating system has booted.
• Each local NVMe device is hardware encrypted using the XTS-AES-256 block cipher and a unique key. Each key is destroyed when the instance is stopped or terminated.
• Local NVMe devices have the same lifetime as the instance they are attached to and do not stick around after the instance has been stopped or terminated.

Now Available
You can launch M6id and C6id instances today in the AWS US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) Regions as On-Demand, Spot, and Reserved Instances or as part of a Savings Plan. As usual with EC2, you pay for what you use. For more information, see the EC2 pricing page.

To learn more, visit our Amazon EC2 M6i instances or C6i instances page, and please send feedback to AWS re:Post for EC2 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

– Channy