AWS Will Be The Last Big Cloud To Turn On Skylake

Amazon has been taking their sweet time to add support for Intel Skylake processors, after having announced support for it on AWS all the way back in November 2016.

Yet, the fabled C5 instances are still nowhere on the horizon.

That, as Microsoft has just announced its first Azure instances running on this silicon, on October 23 to be precise. And with Google having started offering Skylake in June 2017, IBM making the switch a month later, that means that the Amazon Web Services platform will be the last one here.

If they do add support for these CPUs, that is.

Seeing as how late they are to the part, Amazon may yet decide to go with a newer chip, the Intel Kaby Lake for example. Or even any of the AMD Ryzen processors that deliver exciting performance in certain workloads.

And while it is far from a disaster, AWS not having enabled Skylake on its cloud until now, it certainly is a little odd given the company’s reputation as a cloud pioneer.

Amazon said last year that the Skylake option that powers the C5 instances will be available in six sizes, with users being able to choose up to 72 vCPUs, and 144 GiB of memory to power their processor intensive apps and workloads on AWS.

Let’s hope they arrive soon!