Amazon closes cloud performance gap with “bare metal instances”
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) kicked off its annual re:Invent conference with a new service designed to make its cloud more competitive to enterprise IT in performance and security, reports Enterprise Cloud News (Banking Technology’s sister publication).
EC2 Bare Metal Instances gives enterprises the “best of both worlds,” Peter DeSantis, AWS VP of global infrastructure, said, launching the service at a keynote. “You get direct access to the underlying hardware, with the elasticity, scalability and security of the AWS Cloud.”
An instance is a virtual server. A “bare metal” server is where a virtual machine runs directly on hardware, for improved performance.
EC2 Bare Metal Instances is designed for non-virtualised workloads, for workloads needing access to a specialised hypervisor, and for “workloads with customer-hostile licensing” DeSantis said — in other words, applications with licensing terms that make them otherwise unsuitable for cloud deployment.
EC2 Bare Metal Instances is available initially in public preview, and will roll out over the coming months, DeSantis says.
Bare Metal Instances is based on the first silicon developed by AWS since it acquired Annapurna in 2015 for ASIC development. The service uses a new hypervisor based on an optimised version of the Linux KVM, DeSantis adds.
AWS faces competition in the bare metal cloud. Oracle introduced its own bare metal service last year. Packet provides bare metal services, and wrote a welcome-to-the-party blog post when AWS’s bare metal offering was rumoured earlier this month. And IBM also has its own cloud bare metal service.
