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EC2 C7i lands in Milan and Calgary too!

AWS What's New ★★★ View Markdown
#aws#infrastructure

Hi, I'm Shii-chan!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

Today's news is one of those "more places to run the instances you already love" announcements, so let me walk you through it!

What was announced?

According to the AWS What's New post, Amazon EC2 C7i instances are now available in two additional regions: Europe (Milan) and Canada West (Calgary). C7i itself isn't new — it's already available elsewhere — but this announcement is specifically about the expanded regional footprint.

The story so far

C7i instances run on custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids) that are exclusive to AWS. AWS says these custom processors deliver up to 15% better performance than comparable x86-based Intel processors used by other cloud providers. Until now, though, builders working out of Milan or Calgary simply couldn't access this instance family locally.

What changes

With this expansion, teams who want to host workloads in or near Milan or Calgary can now pick C7i too. That matters if you have data residency requirements or latency-sensitive users in those regions and were previously stuck choosing a different instance family.

C7i is a good fit for workloads like:

  • Batch processing
  • Distributed analytics
  • Ad serving
  • Video encoding

All of these are compute-intensive, and AWS says C7i delivers up to 15% better price-performance than C6i instances for this kind of work.

Dive Deep

The C7i lineup offers a wide range of sizes:

  • Standard sizes up to 48xlarge
  • Two bare metal sizes: metal-24xl and metal-48xl

The bare metal sizes are worth calling out because they support built-in Intel accelerators:

  • Data Streaming Accelerator
  • In-Memory Analytics Accelerator
  • QuickAssist Technology

These are designed to offload and accelerate data operations, so workloads that can take advantage of them get an extra performance boost. Note that this specific announcement is only about regional availability — the instance specs and performance characteristics themselves haven't changed.

Wrap-up

  • C7i instances are now available in Europe (Milan) and Canada West (Calgary)
  • Powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon (Sapphire Rapids), up to 15% faster than comparable x86 Intel processors from other clouds
  • Up to 15% better price-performance versus C6i
  • Standard sizes up to 48xlarge, plus two bare metal sizes (metal-24xl, metal-48xl)
  • Bare metal sizes include built-in DSA, IAA, and QAT accelerators

If you're building infrastructure around Milan or Calgary, or running CPU-heavy workloads like batch jobs and video encoding, this is a quietly nice update for you!

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