New – Amazon EC2 C6i Instances Powered by the Latest Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors

We recently introduced Amazon EC2 M6i instances powered by the latest generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, which offer customers up to 15% improvement in price performance compared to M5 instances. Today, I am happy to announce the availability of the new compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C6i instances, which offer up to 15% improvement in price performance for a variety of workloads, versus comparable C5 instances. These instances are ideal for running compute-intensive workloads such as batch processing, machine learning, high-end gaming, high performance computing (HPC) workloads, ad serving, and video encoding. Compared to C5 instances using an Intel processor, this new instance type provides: Up to 15% improvement in compute price performance. Up…

Goodbye Microsoft SQL Server, Hello Babelfish

Many of our customers are telling us they want to move away from commercial database vendors to avoid expensive costs and burdensome licensing terms. But migrating away from commercial and legacy databases can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. When migrating your databases, you can automate the migration of your database schema and data using the AWS Schema Conversation Tool and AWS Database Migration Service. But there is always more work to do to migrate the application itself, including rewriting application code that interacts with the database. Motivation is there, but costs and risks are often limiting factors. Today, we are making Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL available. Babelfish allows Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition to understand the SQL Server wire protocol. It allows you…

New – Attribute-Based Instance Type Selection for EC2 Auto Scaling and EC2 Fleet

The first AWS service I used, more than ten years ago, was Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Over time, EC2 has added a wide selection of instance types optimized to fit different use cases, with a varying combination of CPU/GPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity to give you the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for your applications. One of the key advantages of the cloud is elasticity. With EC2 Fleet, you can synchronously request capacity across multiple instance types and purchase options, launching your instances across multiple Availability Zones, using the On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot Instances together. With EC2 Auto Scaling, you can automatically add or remove EC2 instances according to conditions you define and add…

New – EC2 Instances Powered by Gaudi Accelerators for Training Deep Learning Models

There are more applications today for deep learning than ever before. Natural language processing, recommendation systems, image recognition, video recognition, and more can all benefit from high-quality, well-trained models. The process of building such a model is iterative: construct an initial model, train it on the ground truth data, do some test inferences, refine the model and repeat. Deep learning models contain many layers (hence the name), each of which transforms outputs of the previous layer. The training process is math and processor intensive, and places demands on just about every part of the systems used for training including the GPU or other training accelerator, the network, and local or network storage. This sophistication and complexity increases training time and…