JA EN
shiichan

New EC2 M8i and M8i-flex Instances Land in Canada West (Calgary)!

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

Hi, it's me, Shiichan! I found news about a new EC2 instance rollout, so let me tell you about it.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS's What's New, Amazon EC2 M8i and M8i-flex instances are now available in the Canada West (Calgary) Region. Both are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors available only on AWS, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud.

The story so far

Until now, the previous-generation M7i and M7i-flex instances were the go-to choice. M8i and M8i-flex were already available in other regions, but not yet in Canada West (Calgary). With this update, users in this region can finally move to the new generation too.

What changes

Anyone who wants to keep their data and workloads in Canada can now pick the latest high-performance instance generation without compromise. If you're running databases, web servers, or AI workloads, just switching instance types could bring a meaningful performance boost.

Dive Deep

Here's how they compare to M7i/M7i-flex and the previous generation:

  • Price-performance: up to 15% better vs. the previous generation
  • Memory bandwidth: 2.5x vs. the previous generation
  • Overall performance: up to 20% better than M7i and M7i-flex
  • PostgreSQL: up to 30% faster
  • NGINX: up to 60% faster
  • AI deep learning recommendation models: up to 40% faster

And here's how to pick between them:

  • M8i-flex: covers the most common sizes from large to 16xlarge, and is the easy first choice for general-purpose workloads that don't fully utilize their compute resources — web/app servers, microservices, small-to-medium data stores, virtual desktops, and more
  • M8i: built for workloads that need the largest sizes or sustained high CPU usage. It's SAP-certified, offers 13 sizes including 2 bare metal sizes, and now includes the new 96xlarge size

You can get started right from the AWS Management Console, and full specs are on the M8i and M8i-flex instance page.

Wrap-up

  • EC2 M8i and M8i-flex are now available in the Canada West (Calgary) Region
  • Custom Intel Xeon 6 processors bring up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x the memory bandwidth vs. the previous generation
  • Up to 20% faster than M7i/M7i-flex, with PostgreSQL up to 30% faster and NGINX up to 60% faster
  • M8i-flex is the easy general-purpose pick, while M8i scales up to bare metal and the largest sizes

If you're choosing instances in the Canada West Region, keep these in mind for your next upgrade!

Related posts