At the beginning of this week Amazon announced a new kind of virtual machine (the Amazon Machine Image or AMI) available for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) customers: the Cluster Compute Instance.
When launched, almost four years ago, EC2 offered just three AMIs: the small, the large and extra large instances, featuring no more than 15GB vRAM and no more than 4 virtual cores.
Over time Amazon enriched the offering by adding another five instances: three high-memory ones (with vRAM ranging from 17.1GB to 68.4GB) and two high-CPU ones (with 2 and 8 virtual cores).
The new Cluster Compute Instances have 23GB vRAM, 33.5 Compute Units (equal to 2 x Intel Xeon X5570 physical CPUs), 1690GB of local storage, 10Gbit Ethernet and a 64bit virtual hardware.
The new AMI, which doesn’t currently support Windows guest operating systems, is priced at $1.60 per hour and it’s only available for deployment at the North Virginia Amazon AWS data center in US.
If a customer wants to reserve the instance, the new AMI costs $4290 for 1 year and $6590 for 3 years. In both cases the price per hour drops to $0.56.