Customers benefit from new SSD-based instance type with low latency access to high-speed storage

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul. 19, 2012-- Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced High I/O instances, a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance targeted towards applications requiring low latency access to high-speed storage. These new instances are backed by solid-state disks (SSDs) and are capable of delivering in excess of 120,000 read input and output operations (IOPS) and over 80,000 write IOPS, making them ideally suited for transaction processing, time series analysis, and mobile and streaming applications that require low latency access to storage systems that can deliver tens of thousands of IOPS. With this new instance type, customers can run demanding data-driven applications on Amazon EC2 without making expensive up-front capital investments. To get started with Amazon EC2, visit http://aws.amazon.com/ec2.

“With the launch of High I/O instances, customers can take advantage of SSD-based instances to run their most demanding applications on AWS, whether it’s running databases that support high-transaction enterprise applications or powering massively popular social, mobile or gaming apps for consumers,” said Peter De Santis, Vice President of Amazon EC2. “These new instances are a more efficient and cost effective way to run high I/O applications and another example of our roadmap being shaped by our customers—as this has been a top request from customers over the last few months.”

Netflix is a major provider of streaming movies and TV shows and runs a major portion of their infrastructure on AWS. Adrian Cockcroft, Director, Architecture at Netflix said, “Netflix is using Cassandra as a key infrastructure component of its globally distributed streaming product. We currently run a high performance Cassandra infrastructure on Amazon EC2 using high memory instances. The ability to leverage SSD-backed instances which provide tens of thousands of IOPS will significantly increase the performance of our Cassandra clusters and overall service capability.”

10gen is the company behind MongoDB, leading development and providing commercial services for the open source NoSQL database. "Many of our customers require large amounts of low latency I/O,” said Max Schireson, President at 10gen. “Our users have been awaiting availability of SSD-backed Amazon EC2 instances that can deliver tens of thousands of IOPS. This type of I/O capability will make customer applications run even more efficiently on AWS. Our largest customers running in AWS are particularly eager to be able to take advantage of SSDs with their much lower latencies and greater I/O capacity."

Customers can launch High I/O instances using the AWS console, Amazon EC2 command line interface, AWS SDKs, and third party libraries. Initially, a Quadruple Extra Large High I/O instance is available in the US-East (N. Virginia) and EU-West (Ireland) regions (and will be made available in other AWS regions in the coming months). High I/O instances can be purchased as On-demand and Reserved instances.

About Amazon Web Services
Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. AWS offers over 28 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan and Singapore.

About Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. The new latest generation Kindle is the lightest, most compact Kindle ever and features the same 6-inch, most advanced electronic ink display that reads like real paper even in bright sunlight. Kindle Touch is a new addition to the Kindle family with an easy-to-use touch screen that makes it easier than ever to turn pages, search, shop, and take notes - still with all the benefits of the most advanced electronic ink display. Kindle Touch 3G is the top of the line e-reader and offers the same new design and features of Kindle Touch, with the unparalleled added convenience of free 3G. Kindle Fire is the Kindle for movies, TV shows, music, books, magazines, apps, games and web browsing with all the content, free storage in the Amazon Cloud, Whispersync, Amazon Silk (Amazon's new revolutionary cloud-accelerated web browser), vibrant color touch screen, and powerful dual-core processor.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.cn, www.amazon.it, and www.amazon.es. As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements
This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

Source: Amazon Web Services

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