AWS re:Invent – Performance Enhancements to Compute and Storage Services

At AWS re:Invent 2014, Amazon has announced enhancements to Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS services.

Amazon EC2 is all set to get a new instance type called C4. Based on Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (code name Haswell) processor, the CPU runs at a base speed of 2.9 GHz that can go up to 3.5 GHz in Turbo boost mode. These instances come with EBS optimization by default to deliver better I/O performance. They are also designed to deliver higher packet per second performance and lower network latency when configured through enhanced networking options. The C4 instances will use hardware virtualization and can be launched only within Amazon VPC.

The block storage service of AWS called Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) will be enhanced to support up to 16TB of storage volumes. The volumes can deliver up to 10,000 of IO operations per second (IOPS). When launched as SSD-backed EBS volumes, customers will get the best possible performance from the storage volumes. When configured for provisioned IOPS based on SSD-backed EBS, customers can get up to 20,000 IOPS.

Finally, Amazon S3, the object storage service of AWS supports event notification. Each bucket can be configured to raise an event when a new object is added. The event can be delivered via Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS or AWS Lambda. The notification contains a JSON payload with the details of the object that can be parsed at the receiving end. Since Amazon S3 is eventually consistent, each object will have a unique ETag that can be verified by developers to ensure that they are accessing the same object specified in the event. Event notifications can be configured using the AWS Management Console.