AWS has unveiled new EC2 instances, available with 6TB, 9TB, and 12TB of memory, making them a very suitable set-up to be used alongside SAP HANA installations.
And that's not all, AWS believes it'll be able to double the memory in its EC2 instances by this time next year - that would offer a healthy 24GB of memory for even higher-intensity applications.
Anyone signing up to AWS' latest instances will also be able to take advantage of its suite of other cloud services, including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS Config.
"Combining the largest memory sizes available in the cloud with the agility and reliability of AWS, Amazon EC2 High Memory instances enable customers to scale their in-memory database deployments and seamlessly integrate them with the rest of AWS," Amazon said.
All three variations of Amazon's EC2 High Memory Instances are powered by Intel Xeon Platinum 8176M (Skylake) processors running at 2.1GHz (with Turbo Boost to 3.80GHz) and are available as Provisioned IOPS, General Purpose (SSD), and Streaming Magnetic volumes, depending on your requirements.
AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr explained he was able to get SAP up and running on a 12TB instance in less than 40 minutes, although using the company's quick start implementation is even quicker, without the need to migrate any data.
The new EC2 High Memory Instances are extremely cost-effective, according to AWS, with the All Upfront 3-Year Reservation for a 12TB set up in the US East region costing $30.539 per hour as an example. At present, they're available to customers in the US East and Asia Pacific regions as dedicated hosts and will soon launch in AWS's US West, Europe and AWS GovCloud (US) regions.
