Today we are launching the five new EC2 bare metal instances that I promised you a few months ago. Your operating system runs on the underlying hardware and has direct access to the processor and other hardware. The instances are powered by AWS-custom Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor (Skylake) processors that deliver sustained all-core Turbo performance.
The M5 instances are designed for general-purpose workloads, such as web and application servers, gaming servers, caching fleets, and app development environments. The R5 instances are designed for high performance databases, web scale in-memory caches, mid-sized in-memory databases, real-time big data analytics, and other memory-intensive enterprise applications. The M5d and R5d variants also include 3.6 TB of local NVMe SSD storage.
In addition to being a great home for old-school applications and system software that are licensed specifically and exclusively for use on physical, non-virtualized hardware, bare metal instances can be used to run tools and applications that require access to low-level processor features such as performance counters. For example, Mozilla’s Record and Replay Framework (
rr) records and replays program execution with low overhead, using the performance counters to measure application performance and to deliver signals and context-switch events with high fidelity