Bare Metal Instances Come To AWS

AWS finally has access to bare metal! Amazon has announced the availability of a new series of EC2 instances in public preview, that do what they say on the tin.

Pun always intended.

As the name gives away, Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances allow users the ability to deploy applications that use physical bare metal hardware resources right within the AWS cloud infrastructure. They also provide users with access to a number of EC2 related tools.

Like Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch, and Auto Recovery.

In addition to that, AWS users also get access to the full suite of services that Amazon offers on its cloud platform, including database, IoT, mobile, analytics, artificial intelligence and security services.

According to the company, the first group of these instances, dubbed i3.metal, are now available in preview, and allow operating systems to run directly on the underlying hardware — while giving users access to all the benefits of the cloud.

Which is to say, they are ideal for workloads that require access to hardware feature sets in order to run, but also could use the ability for application scaling up and down quickly.

In terms of hardware, you are looking at processor access to two Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 processors running at 2.3GHz, 512GiB of memory, 15.2 terabytes of local, SSD-based NVMe storage, and 25Gbps of ENA-based enhanced networking.

Extreme stuff.

If you’re ready to get some metal going, you can complete a request form on the AWS website to receive access during the preview period.

Will you?