Instance storage can be incredibly fast for certain workloads but it's a shame AWS doesn't offer instance storage on Windows EC2 instances.
Instance storage seems to only be available for (large) Linux EC2 instances.
Instance storage seems to only be available for (large) Linux EC2 instances.
There are no operating system limitations that I'm aware of, however. I was just able to launch a Windows m6idn.2xlarge to verify.
My use case was to bring up a Windows instance using instance storage as the root device instead using of EBS which is the default root device.
I wanted to run some benchmarks directly on drive C:\ — backed by an NVMe SSD-based instance store — because of an app that will only install to drive C:\, but it seems there’s no way to do this.
The EC2 docs definitely gave me the impression that instance storage is not supported on Windows as a root volume.
Here’s one such note from the docs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/RootDevi...
”Windows instances do not support instance-store backed root volumes.”
Really nice that you are engaging with the comments here on HN as the article’s author.
(For others who may not be aware, msolson = Marc Olson)
Before we launched the c4 instance family the vast majority of instance launches were from EBS backed AMIs, so we decided to remove a pile of complexity, and beginning with the c4 instance family, we stopped supporting instance storage root volumes on new instance families.