Enterprises Continue To Show Interest In Larger AWS EC2 Instances

One thing that has become a norm over the past year is the shift towards larger and larger AWS EC2 instance types, as enterprises continue to move their production workloads on the platform.

The core compute and storage services continue to attract the most enterprise IT attention for AWS, in stark contrast to higher-level services like Amazon Aurora and AWS Lambda, which generate most of the buzz around the Amazon Web Services platform these days.

The Elastic Computer Cloud is pretty much the bedrock of the AWS cloud platform, and has seen a steady expansion of instance options ever since its first introduction in 2009.

Even as the cloud giant tries to fill the gaps in its lineup — it has added nearly 30 new EC2 instance types in the past 12 months, making a third of its total EC2 portfolio. And while most of these VMs are slight tweaks to existing instance types, one pattern is evident.

They are getting bigger.

The amount of compute, storage, memory and network capacities within these EC2 instance types continue to grow bigger, as enterprise customers demand these specifications for their array of advanced applications that demand more power.

And although AWS is normally tight-lipped in most matters, the company recently discussed a roadmap, with plans to offer single-node instances of up to 16 TB of memory by 2018. Clearly targeting organizations that want to move their SAP workloads into its cloud platform.

The fact that SAP is a very big part of the IT landscape, means that if you can get into the mix, then the rest of the systems follow.

Of course, AWS is not alone in this, Google and Microsoft are also investing heavily in order to lure SAP customers into their clouds. This will call for not just going bigger, but also diversification of EC2 instance types with technologies like field programmable gate arrays and move into the world of bare-metal.

At the end of the day, this evolution from AWS is really what its customers are driving it to, as enterprises continue to move away from private clouds and data centers.