Amazon Web Services Unveils High I/O Instances

Written by Chris Talbot 1
July 20, 2012

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services released high I/O instances as a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for applications that need low latency access to high-speed storage.

With solid state disks (SSDs) providing the storage backbone for the new instances, Amazon claims the high I/O instances can provide more than 120,000 read input and output operations (IOPS) and over 80,000 write IOPS. For customers and partners providing applications on Amazon EC2, the new high I/O instances are suited to transaction processing, time series analysis and mobile and streaming applications that can’t be tied up by latency in accessing storage.

To show off the new instances, one of the customers Amazon is touting is Netflix, which runs Cassandra infrastructure on EC2 and, by using high I/O, promises a significant performance increase to those clusters and overall service capability. Netflix users, let us know if you see any improvements to your service the next time you watch episodes of “Family Guy.”

Peter De Santis, vice president of Amazon EC2, said the high I/O instances enable customers to “take advantage of SSD-based instances to run their most demanding applications on AWS, whether it’s running databases that support high-transaction enterprise applications or powering massively popular social, mobile or gaming apps for consumers.”

Amazon is making the new instances available to customers on-demand and as reserved instances.

This clearly puts the ball in Google‘s court in the endless competition between the largest cloud providers. When Google Compute Engine launched at the end of June, it looked like the “do no evil” corporation had possibly one-upped Amazon, and there were meanderings in the ether that perhaps Google would solve I/O problems that had plagued EC2 customers. The announced SSD-based high I/O instances ups the ante a bit more as Amazon tries to show that EC2 can run the kinds of heavy-duty applications fast-paced businesses need.

For partners, this is one more tool in the old toolbox they can take to their customers. Instead of hearing complaints about latency issues regarding applications, now partners have a solution to prevent to end users.

We’ll see what Google cooks up next to try drawing EC2 customers to its new platform.