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.