Amazon's cloud introduces ‘bare metal’ computing service
Amazon: When customers come to us with new and unique requirements for AWS, we listen closely, ask lots of questions, and do our best to understand and address their needs. When we do this, we make the resulting service or feature generally available; we do not build one-offs or “snowflakes” for individual customers. That model is messy and hard to scale and is not the way we work.
Instead, every AWS customer has access to whatever it is that we build, and everyone benefits. VMware Cloud on AWS is a good example of this strategy in action. They told us that they wanted to run their virtualization stack directly on the hardware, within the AWS Cloud, giving their customers access to the elasticity, security, and reliability (not to mention the broad array of services) that AWS offers.
We knew that other customers also had interesting use cases for bare metal hardware and didn’t want to take the performance hit of nested virtualization. They wanted access to the physical resources for applications that take advantage of low-level hardware features such as performance counters and Intel® VT that are not always available or fully supported in virtualized environments, and also for applications intended to run directly on the hardware or licensed and supported for use in non-virtualized environments.
Our multi-year effort to move networking, storage, and other EC2 features out of our virtualization platform and into dedicated hardware was already well underway and provided the perfect foundation for a possible solution. This work, as I described in Now Available – Compute-Intensive C5 Instances for Amazon EC2, includes a set of dedicated hardware accelerators.
Now that we have provided VMware with the bare metal access that they requested, we are doing the same for all AWS customers. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you can do with them!
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