Amazon EC2 Features

Amazon Web Services has a total of 6 availability zones in two regions (Beijing region operated by Sinnet and Ningxia region operated by NWCD) in China. Each availability zone has independent power, cooling and physical security, and is connected through redundant ultra-low delay networks. Availability zones enable customers to run applications and databases that are stronger than a single data center in terms of availability, fault tolerance and scalability. Customers can design their applications to run in multiple availability zones or even across regions to achieve greater fault tolerance.

Amazon Cloudfront is a fast content distribution network (CDN) service that can securely distribute data, videos, applications and APIs to customers worldwide with low latency and high transmission speed in a developer friendly environment. Cloudfront China has edge sites in Beijing, Shanghai, Zhongwei and Shenzhen.

The Amazon Graviton2 processors deliver up to 7x performance, 4x the number of compute cores, 2x larger caches, 5x faster memory, and 50% faster per core encryption performance than first generation Amazon Graviton processors. The processors are built utilizing 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by Amazon on the advanced 7 nm manufacturing technology. Each core of the Amazon Graviton2 processor is a single-threaded vCPU. These processors also offer always-on fully encrypted DRAM memory, hardware acceleration for compression workloads, dedicated engines per vCPU that double the floating-point performance for workloads such as video encoding, and instructions for int8/fp16 CPU-based machine learning inference acceleration. Optimize CPUs feature gives you greater control of your Amazon EC2 instances on two fronts. First, you can specify a custom number of vCPUs when launching new instances to save on vCPU-based licensing costs.

For an additional low, hourly fee, customers can launch selected Amazon EC2 instances types as EBS-optimized instances. EBS-optimized instances enable EC2 instances to fully use the IOPS provisioned on an EBS volume. EBS-optimized instances are designed for use with both Standard and Provisioned IOPS Amazon EBS volumes. When attached to EBS-optimized instances, Provisioned IOPS volumes can achieve single digit millisecond latencies and are designed to deliver within 10% of the provisioned IOPS performance 99.9% of the time.

Customers with complex computational workloads such as tightly coupled parallel processes, or with applications sensitive to network performance, can achieve the same high compute and network performance provided by custom-built infrastructure while benefiting from the elasticity, flexibility and cost advantages of Amazon EC2. Cluster Compute, Cluster GPU, and High Memory Cluster instances have been specifically engineered to provide high-performance network capability and can be programmatically launched into clusters – allowing applications to get the low-latency network performance required for tightly coupled, node-to-node communication. Cluster instances also provide significantly increased throughput making them well suited for customer applications that need to perform network-intensive operations.

Amazon Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define. With Auto Scaling, you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using scales up seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and scales down automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage. See Auto Scaling for more details.

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve even greater fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the amount of load balancing capacity needed in response to incoming application traffic. Elastic Load Balancing detects unhealthy instances within a pool and automatically reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored. See Elastic Load Balancing for more details.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of the Amazon Web Services Cloud where you can launch Amazon Web Services resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. See Amazon Virtual Private Cloud for more details.

Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing. An Elastic IP address is associated with your account not a particular instance, and you control that address until you choose to explicitly release it. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, however, Elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or Availability Zone failures by programmatically remapping your public IP addresses to any instance in your account.

Enhanced Networking enables you to get significantly higher packet per second (PPS) performance, lower network jitter and lower latencies. This feature uses a new network virtualization stack that provides higher I/O performance and lower CPU utilization compared to traditional implementations. For instructions on how to enable Enhanced Networking on EC2 instances, see the Enhanced Networking on Linux and Enhanced Networking on Windows tutorials.