Amazon Unveils EC2 A1 Arm Bare Metal Instances

A1 ARM Instances

Amazon had first released its 64-bit ARM EC2 A1 Instances back in 2018, which are part of AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), an ever-evolving virtual platform that supports business subscribers utilizing applications in the cloud.

 Arm Bare Metal Instances

The most recent launch is the EC2 A1 ARM Bare Metal Instances, which Amazon is reporting is similar to the previous version of A1 ARM Instances, but with greater reach within the ARM ecosystem.

The Servers

The new EC2 A1 Arm instances are powered by the AWS Graviton Processors, featuring the 64-bit Arm Neoverse with custom silicon developed by AWS. 

Features Include

• • Amazon Machine Images (AMI)
  • Elastic Block Store (EBS)
  • Auto Scaling

Applications can have  more direct access to the processor and memory resources within the underlying server.  Some of the different types of scale-out applications the new Instances support and will enhance are –

Application Types

• • Web Servers
  • Containerized Microservices
  • Caching Fleets
  • Distributed Data Stores

A1 Arm Bare Metal Instance

The EC2 A1 ARM Bare Metal Instances offer alternative to existing Intel Xenon Scalable processors instances such as m5.metal, m5d.metal, r5.metal, r5d.metal, and z1d.metal.

The new a1.metal instance comes with 16 logical Arm processors, 32GB memory, 3.5 Gbps EBS-optimized bandwidth, and up to 10 Gbps network bandwidth.

It’s available now in in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Asia Pacific (Sydney).

Bare Metal Environments

The term Bare Metal is referring to the metal in a hard disk, which is the usual medium where an OS is stored. The Bare Metal environment is virtual machine instances that are installed directly onto the hardware, rather than within the software of the host OS.

How Bare Metal Works

The user rents hardware resources from the remote provider, which affords greater flexibility – for high-transaction and big-data applications, which don’t tolerate latency.

How AWS EC2 Billing Works

AWS offers to price based on what service you need and how you will use that service. EC2 is offered the billing options of, On-Demand, Spot Instances, Reserved Instances, and Dedicated Host, and also Per-second Billing.

AWS EC2 Account Setup

The account setup is free, and the EC2 platform has a free trial to try period.

For further research and information

• • • AWS Amazon’s EC2 A1 ARM Bare Metal Instances announcement
    • Amazon EC2 Pricing 

Thanks to Zoobab for the tip.

Stephen Vicinanza

Stephen started writing about technology after publishing sci-fi short stories. His first White-Paper, written in 2008, was well received and inspired him to continue writing about technology. Today he writes in the technology space full time, covering a multitude of topics. During the time he wrote part-time he edited hundreds of titles for large publishers, in science and technology. He lives in Staten Island, with his wife and children.

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