High local storage performance

Why Amazon EC2 I4i Instances?

Amazon EC2 I4i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and feature up to 30 TB of local AWS Nitro SSD storage. Nitro SSDs are NVMe-based and custom-designed by AWS to provide high I/O performance, low latency, minimal latency variability, and security with always-on encryption. I4i instances deliver up to 30% better compute price performance, 60% lower storage I/O latency, and 75% lower storage I/O latency variability compared to I3 instances. These instances are a great fit for databases such as MySQL, Oracle DB, and Microsoft SQL Server, and NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Couchbase, Aerospike, and Redis where low latency local NVMe storage is needed in order to meet application service level agreements (SLAs).

Benefits

Lower TCO

I4i instances deliver up to 30% better compute price performance than I3 instances. I4i instances also offer a new size with up to 128 vCPUs and 1,024 GiB of memory, which is twice the size of the largest I3 instance. The higher instance size lets you to consolidate workloads on fewer instances and save on per core licensing costs.

Faster application performance

While some SSD-based instances are created to achieve high results for benchmark tests that may not represent real workloads, I4i instances are designed to increase the number of transactions that can be processed per second (TPS). This allows you to meet or exceed application service level agreements (SLAs) and deliver higher performance to end-users.

Maximized resource efficiency

I4i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances for better overall performance and security.

Features

Powered by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors

I4i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, and include support for always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). 

High performance remote storage and networking

I4i instances support 40 Gbps bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) in the largest size and up to 10 Gbps in the four smallest sizes, which is twice that of I3 instances. I4i instances also support up to 75 Gbps networking bandwidth, which is three times more than I3 instances.

Built on AWS Nitro System

The AWS Nitro System is a rich collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware and software to deliver high performance, high availability, and high security while also reducing virtualization overhead.