Amazon Web Services announces next generation EC2 instances

(c)iStock.com/zakokor

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced M4 instances for its EC2 cloud, adding another selection of compute instances to an already well-established list.

The M4 instances will deliver processing power with custom 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2676 Haswell processors, and aim to provide lower network latency and jitter – the variation between packets arriving – through Enhanced Networking. M4 also offers dedicated bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS).

AWS claims M4 instances are most likely to suit a wide variety of applications, such as relational and in-memory databases, as well as gaming servers.

“Amazon EC2 provides a comprehensive selection of instances to support virtually any workload, and we continue to deliver new technologies and high performance in our current generation instances,” said Matt Garman, AWS VP for EC2 in a statement. “With these capabilities, M4 is one of our most powerful instances types and a terrific choice for workloads requiring a balance of compute, memory, and network resources,” he added.

AWS customers can launch M4 instances using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface, AWS SDKs, as well as third party libraries.

The latest instances add to AWS’ ecosystem, but also add to the complexity of instances on offer. As a result companies like 2nd Watch, which manages more than 10,000 AWS instance for enterprise, make value out of consulting. Recent figures from the company revealed EC2 remained the most popular AWS service, with 98% of customers using it, just ahead of S3 (97%).

Zacks.com, an analyst house, argued following the launch of M4: “AWS is the biggest public cloud in the market. But the competition in the cloud market is intensifying, and so is the cloud storage war between Microsoft and Google. But amid this war, we remain extremely positive about AWS’s growth prospects. The latest launch is basically an added feather to its cap.”

You can find out more about M4 instances here.