Amazon EC2 Servers Now 64-bit Compatible
Amazon’s cloud-based server service, EC2 – or elastic compute cloud – got a huge upgrade today. Now all EC2 instances can handle 64-bit operating systems. This is great news for those looking to upgrade from a micro instance with a 64-bit OS installed. Before this change, small instances, which gives users 1.7GB of memory, were not capable of handling 64-bit OSes. The problem was, the micro instances were capable – so if you were looking to upgrade to a small instance, you were SOL.
With the upgrade, they also introduce an intermediary between the small and large instances, called (go figure) a medium instance. Unless you have or are looking to use cloud-based services with Amazon, this all must seem incredibly boring. That’s because it is.. but it does keep this site up and running.
Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,
Earlier this week, we lowered prices for Amazon EC2. Today, we are announcing three new features that make it even easier for you to use Amazon EC2 for your application and development needs.
Many of you have asked for the ability to run 64-bit Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on all instance types. You can now launch 64-bit AMIs on m1.small and c1.medium instances, making it easier to scale your applications vertically across t1.micro, standard, high CPU and high memory instances types using the same 64-bit AMI.
We are also announcing a new Amazon EC2 instance type, m1.medium. This new instance provides customers with 2 EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) of compute power, 3.75 GB of memory, and 410 GB of instance storage, making it ideal for many enterprise applications that require a reasonable amount of CPU and memory, but do not require all the resources of an m1.large instance type. The m1.medium instance type is available in all regions and supports both 32 and 64-bit architectures. To learn more about Amazon EC2 instance types, including pricing for m1.medium instances, please visit the Amazon EC2 detail page.
Our third announcement today is about a new feature in the AWS console that makes it even easier for you to use Amazon EC2 Linux instances. Customers have been asking us to enable the ability to log into their instances directly from the AWS console. Starting today, you can log in to your Linux instances from the EC2 console without the need to install additional software clients. Please see the Amazon EC2 Getting Started Guide for details on how to use this new functionality.
We are always striving to address customer needs and requirements, so please continue to let us know how we can improve your Amazon EC2 experience.
Sincerely,
Amazon EC2 Team
