Instances built on the Amazon Nitro System
The Nitro System is a collection of hardware and software components built by Amazon that enable high performance, high availability, and high security.
The Nitro System provides bare metal capabilities that eliminate virtualization overhead and support workloads that require full access to host hardware. Bare metal instances are well suited for the following:
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Workloads that require access to low-level hardware features (for example, Intel VT) that are not available or fully supported in virtualized environments
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Applications that require a non-virtualized environment for licensing or support
Nitro components
The following components are part of the Nitro System:
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Nitro card
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Local NVMe storage volumes
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Networking hardware support
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Management
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Monitoring
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Security
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Nitro security chip, integrated into the motherboard
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Nitro hypervisor - A lightweight hypervisor that manages memory and CPU allocation and delivers performance that is indistinguishable from bare metal for most workloads.
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Network feature support
The following content summarizes key networking capabilities for each version of the Nitro System. Versions are shown in descending version release order. If you know the instance type family that your instance belongs to, you can expand the Specifications section and select your instance family. The Platform summary table for your instance family shows the Nitro version for your instance type in the Hypervisor column.
If you're not sure which instance family applies, see the Naming conventions section.
Note
Features are cumulative, meaning that newer versions of the Nitro system support the features that are listed in all prior versions, except where explicitly stated otherwise.
See the Nitro instance requirements section for the minimum ENA driver and Linux kernel versions for optimal performance of Nitro v4 and later instance types.
Nitro v5
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Traffic Mirroring is not supported for this version.
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Up to 200 Gbps* per network card.
Nitro v4
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Traffic Mirroring is not supported for this version.
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GPU accelerated and Trainium based instance types support up to 100 Gbps* per network card for consistency. Other instance types support up to 170 Gbps* per network card.
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Remote direct memory access (RDMA) write is available with EFA for
p5.48xlarge
andp5e.48xlarge
instances. -
Supports ENA Express. For more information about ENA Express, including what specific instance types support it see Improve network performance with ENA Express on your EC2 instances in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.
Nitro v3
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Up to 100 Gbps* per network card.
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Supports RDMA read with EFA for
p4d(e).24xlarge
instances. -
Encryption in transit.
Nitro v2
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Enhanced networking with Elastic Network Adapter (ENA).
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Traffic Mirroring.
* Your instance type might support a lower maximum bandwidth. For more information, refer to the network specifications for your instance type in the instance family pages.
Virtualized instances
The following virtualized instances are built on the Nitro System:
Bare metal instances
The following bare metal instances are built on the Nitro System:
In most cases, when you launch a bare metal instance, the underlying server goes through its boot process, during which it verifies all hardware and firmware components. This means that it can take up to 20 minutes or more from the time the instance enters the running state until it becomes available over the network.
Nitro instance requirements
Instances built on the Amazon Nitro System use ENA for enhanced networking, and storage volumes exposed as NVMe block devices. For more information about NVMe drivers, see Install or upgrade the NVMe driver in the Amazon EBS User Guide for Linux instances, or Amazon NVMe drivers for Windows instances in the Amazon EC2 User Guide. For more information about ENA drivers, see Requirements for enhanced networking with ENA in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.
The following tabs show details about which driver or kernel versions are recommended for your operating system.
Linux instances with Amazon Graviton processors
Linux instances with Amazon Graviton processors have the following additional requirements:
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An AMI with 64-bit ARM architecture.
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Support for UEFI boot with ACPI tables and ACPI hot-plug of PCI devices.
Note
Amazon Graviton processors only support Linux operating systems.