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Comment by snewman | Hacker News Reader

Wow. This is a massive price drop from the I2 instances... so massive that I question whether I'm reading it correctly:

    i2.xlarge: 4 vCPU / 14 ECU, 30.5 GB RAM, 1 x 800 SSD, $0.853 per Hour

    i3.xlarge: 4 vCPU / 13 ECU, 30.5 GB RAM, 1 x 950 SSD, $0.312 per Hour

Slightly less CPU, slightly more SSD, 63% cheaper. Or for another comparison:

    r3.xlarge: 4 vCPU / 13 ECU, 30.5 GB RAM, 1 x  80 SSD, $0.333 per Hour

r3, unlike i2, is listed as "current generation", but also seems strictly worse than i3.

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I interviewed with Amazon several months ago (and turned down the offer, so I have no affiliation); as part of the casual conversation with the people there, it was mentioned to me that the company hadn't offered instances optimized for IO up until that point due to other priorities but had been recently focusing on it with the I tentions of releasing something like this soon.

I was under an NDA on the topic and so never mentioned it; now that it's been released, i am free to say that this has been worked on for a while and that these sorts of gains in performance were not only expected but a goal.

(No disclaimer: I didn't take the job and none of my work or personal projects run on AWS.)

I don't think it takes any special NDA protected knowledge to say that a new instance type was "worked on a for a while", given how rarely they release new instance types (the i2 family was announced in Dec 2013). Likewise, the i* family is their "I/O intensive workload" family, so again, it's clear that gains in I/O performance was a goal when designing i3's, the i2 family was definitely showing its age, even compared to a modern laptop.

The newer R4:

    r4.xlarge: 4 vCPU / 13.5 ECU, 30.5 GB RAM,    EBS only, $0.266 per Hour

Good point: if you don't need any local storage at all, then r4s are a bit cheaper. Still, an extra $576 / year (the price difference between i3.xlarge and r4.xlarge) for 950 GB of SSD really seems quite cheap, especially as that's the on-demand price.

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