EC2 Bare Metal Instances with Direct Access to Hardware

Re:EC2 Bare Metal Instances with Direct Access to Hardware by _msw_ on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @11:17AM (#15807933)

EC2 Bare Metal instances boot from an EBS volume that is accessed via a NVMe PCI device (implemented in ASICs built by Annapurna Labs), just like virtualized C5 instances.

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Re:EC2 Bare Metal Instances with Direct Access to Hardware by KaiserPro on Thursday November 30, 2017 @02:45AM (#15814086)

Why would you boot what is essentially an iSCSI target via NVMe?

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Re:EC2 Bare Metal Instances with Direct Access to Hardware by _msw_ on Thursday November 30, 2017 @03:06PM (#15819023)

NVMe is just how the storage is surfaced -- the hardware programming interface for the block device. Hardware iSCSI initiators (HBAs) also have a hardware programming interface, but at the end of the day you talk SCSI over that interface.

NVMe is a better match for the the storage operations supported by EBS. A bonus is that by surfacing EBS over NVMe there is a common storage interface for both managed storage volumes and local NVMe storage.

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Re:EC2 Bare Metal Instances with Direct Access to Hardware by KaiserPro on Friday December 01, 2017 @08:38AM (#15823692)

so is that a hardware cache, software cache or a storage tier?

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Re:EC2 Bare Metal Instances with Direct Access to Hardware by _msw_ on Friday December 01, 2017 @01:25PM (#15825960)

The NVMe interface to EBS volumes that is implemented in our Nitro system today is closest to a HBA with no additional caching. So, a storage tier.

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