New – Amazon EC2 M2 Pro Mac Instances Built on Apple Silicon M2 Pro Mac Mini Computers

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Amazon EC2 M2 Pro Mac instances. These instances deliver up to 35 percent faster performance over the existing M1 Mac instances when building and testing applications for Apple platforms. New EC2 M2 Pro Mac instances are powered by Apple M2 Pro Mac Mini computers featuring 12 core CPU, 19 core GPU, 32 GiB of memory, and 16 core Apple Neural Engine and uniquely enabled by the AWS Nitro System through high-speed Thunderbolt connections, offering these Mac mini computers as fully integrated and managed compute instances with up to 10 Gbps of Amazon VPC network bandwidth and up to 8 Gbps of Amazon EBS storage bandwidth. EC2 M2 Pro Mac instances support macOS…

New – NVMe Reservations for Amazon Elastic Block Store io2 Volumes

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) io2 and io2 Block Express volumes now support storage fencing using NVMe reservations. As I learned while writing this post, storage fencing is used to regulate access to storage for a compute or database cluster, ensuring that just one host in the cluster has permission to write to the volume at any given time. For example, you can set up SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) and get higher application availability within a single Availability Zone without the need for database replication. As a quick refresher, io2 Block Express volumes are designed to meet the needs of the most demanding I/O-intensive applications running on Nitro-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Volumes can…

AWS Weekly Roundup: C7i Instances, Knowledge Base for Amazon Bedrock, and More (Sept. 18, 2023)

While daylight is getting shorter in the Northern hemisphere, we’ve got two new EC2 instance types optimized for compute and memory and many new capabilities for other services. Last week there was also the EMEA AWS Heroes Summit in Munich, an amazing day full of insights and passion. Here’s a nice picture of the participants! Last Week’s Launches Here are some of the launches that caught my attention last week: C7i Instances – Powered by custom 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids) and available only on AWS, these compute-optimized instances offer up to 15 percent better performance over comparable x86-based Intel processors used by other cloud providers. A great choice for all compute-intensive workloads, such as batch…