At the AWS re:invent, Amazon introduced C3 (compute optimized instance family) instances running on Ivy Bridge Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz processors with storage provided by an SSD. The C3 instances gained a lot popularity within such a short time that Amazon couldn’t provide most of the customers with the capacity being requested. It has prompted Amazon to issue a statement on their efforts to accelerate their orders for additional capacity across all regions within the next couple of weeks.
“We believed that this instance type would be popular, but would not have imagined just how popular they’ve been. The EC2 team took a look back and found that growth in C3 usage to date has been higher than they have seen for any other newly introduced instance type. We’re not talking about some small percentage difference here. It took just two weeks for C3 usage to exceed the level that the former fastest-growing instance type achieved in twenty-two weeks!” – Jeff Bezos in this blogpost.
AWS will also be expanding their Linux-server cloud offering. This opens up the option for cutomers to migrate their 64-bit Linux VMs to the AWS cloud. For use in production or disaster recovery, the AWS cloud will support virtual machines from VMware, Xen and Hyper-V.
