Amazon moves to next-generation compute instances

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Sensing the customer need for more computational muscle in smaller packages, Amazon Web Services has added a number of new packages in its Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service. The Amazon subsidiary also reduced prices on selected storage packages, reducing the cost of its Simple Storage Service (S3) by up to 22 percent and Elastic Block Service (EBS) by up to 50 percent. The new packages, or compute instances, in the EC2 line fill out the company’s second-generation M3 line of instances, which the company is now touting as the successor to the original M1 line.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced the M3 series a year ago as a more performance-minded alternative to the base M1 offerings. The M3 series features faster CPUs, making them better suited for compute-intensive tasks such as video encoding, batch processing and caching. The M3 line also features SSDs (solid-state disks) which, according to AWS, offer a more consistent I/O rate than M1 services…

Previously, customers could only get the M series instances in four or eight virtual CPU packages. The two additions to the M3 family provide smaller instance sizes, with one or two virtual CPUs. The M3 instances run on Intel Xeon E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge) processors. AWS is pitching the M3 instances (called M3.medium and M3.large) for general computing tasks — such as maintaining a small or medium-sized database, or for running an enterprise application — that the customer might have run on M1 instances before. AWS claims that, for these workloads, the M3 instances provide more consistent performance and are more cost-effective…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/401200/amazon-moves-next-generation-compute-instances