The big picture: Amazon Web Services is one of the largest cloud providers in the world. Competition is fierce, and Big Tech corporations are continually enhancing their offerings for customers who require robust remote instances to run their applications or services.
A recent study by Synergy Research Group confirmed that AWS is the leading cloud service provider with a 31 percent market share. According to new data from Liftr Insights, Amazon is actively striving to satisfy even the most demanding customers. The market intelligence firm identified a new 896-core instance now available on AWS, marking the highest core count recorded to date.
Previously, the most powerful instance offered by Amazon featured 448 cores. This means that the new instance doubles the maximum core count available to customers just a few years ago. The price for an 896-core instance can vary depending on the city and configuration, ranging from around $150 to over $400 per hour, with an average of $263.
Liftr initially detected the new AWS instance in the East and West Coast regions of the US, consistent with Amazon's past cloud deployments. The 896-core instance was also observed in data centers in Seoul and Sydney, indicating a strong demand for this level of performance in these regions.
The price tag of the new offering is significant, but larger companies are likely more than willing to pay it if they need that much power in the cloud. Liftr cites intensive database tools like SAP HANA and Oracle as applications that can greatly benefit from a large core count. In many instances, a higher number of simultaneous threads along with larger memory configurations can work more efficiently on intensive data processing tasks.
Liftr CEO Tab Schadt said AWS and other major cloud providers don't deploy costly solutions without market demand. He emphasized their significant investment in researching customer needs through market intelligence. Competitors, Schadt added, can leverage this research to offer alternative services at a fraction of the cost in certain regions.
While Liftr did not provide specific information about the hardware architecture underlying the new 896-core instance, they predict a general trend towards increased multi-core configurations in cloud services in the near future. Larger instances are expected to become more prevalent, with Azure (Microsoft) and other major providers likely to respond to Amazon's latest offering in a similar manner.