Amazon Web Services (AWS) eliminated the networking bandwidth burst duration limitations from storage optimized instances within its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Limitations were removed for EC2 I7i and I8g instances on sizes larger than "4xlarge," doubling the network bandwidth available at all times for each.

AWS reported the instance sizes previously offered baseline bandwidth and relied on a network input/output (I/O) credit system to temporarily burst beyond that limit as capacity allowed, with that limit to remain to sizes smaller than 4xlarge.

The hyperscaler said the lift of the limitations would allow customers running memory- and network-intensive workloads on larger instance sizes to consistently achieve peak network bandwidth. This can better ensure predictable performance for applications that demand sustained high-throughput connectivity, such as AI inference, high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, and big data analytics.

More on I7i and I8g

Amazon’s I7i and I8g instances are engineered for I/O-heavy workloads that require prompt data access and low-latency storage performance. The I8g offering, made generally available late last year, is powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton4 processors and third-generation AWS Nitro SSDs, delivering high I/O operations per second and storage density for throughput-heavy use cases.

The I7i family uses Intel Xeon Scalable Emerald Rapids processors together with third-generation Nitro SSDs to provide optimized compute-plus-storage performance among x86-based storage instances.

Both are used for transactional, real-time, and distributed databases where low latency to local storage and sustained I/O are critical, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, HBase, and alongside NoSQL platforms such as Aerospike, MongoDB, ClickHouse, and Apache Druid.

Aside from AI training, the instances are also optimized for real-time analytics frameworks such as Apache Spark and data lakehouse architectures.

Each instance supports up to 1.5 TiB of memory, 45 TB local instance storage, and can deliver up to 100 Gb/s of network bandwidth and 60 Gb/s of dedicated bandwidth for AWS’ Elastic Block Store (EBS) block-level storage service.