AWS just announced the launch of a new series of Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances in public preview. These instances allow users to deploy applications that use physical bare metal hardware resources right within the AWS cloud infrastructure.
The first group of these instances, the i3.metal instances, is currently available for preview users. Here’s a rundown of the new instances and how you can use them.
Features of Bare Metal Instances
The new i3.metal instances, which are currently available in public preview, are meant to allow operating systems to run directly on the underlying hardware while also giving users access to all the benefits of using the cloud. This means you can use the AWS cloud infrastructure to run workloads that require access to hardware feature sets in order to run. You also have the ability to scale those applications up and down quickly.
The processor and other hardware that users can access includes 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.
In addition, Bare Metal Instances give users access to various EC2 related tools including Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch, and Auto Recovery. Users can also access the full suite of AWS database, IoT, mobile, analytics, artificial intelligence, and security services.
How to use Bare Metal Instances
Amazon’s EC2 Bare Metal Instances in the “i3.metal” instance type are now available in public preview. You can complete a request form on the AWS website to receive access during the preview period. Then you can bring in specialized applications or even your own stack of virtualized components to the AWS infrastructure and run them on Bare Metal Instances to take advantage of all the features and benefits that this new offering can give.
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