Introduction

For those new to EC2, EC2 offers auto-scalable instances with compute, memory, storage and networking, deployable in multiple Availability zones/Regions while targetable by a load balancer along with management / administration tools such as AWS Systems Manager and AWS License Manager. EC2 instances are available under multiple purchase options such as Spot, On-Demand, Reserved and Savings Plan. It offers a broad choice of processors such as Intel, AMD and Amazon’s very own ARM-based Graviton processors. EC2 also allows the possibility of using Application Specific Integrated-Circuit (ASICs) and Field Programmable Gate-Array (FPGAs).

For those new to terms like ASIC and FPGA, they provide an alternate way to compute than CPU and GPU. Unlike CPU and GPU, which have a predefined instruction set and general purpose or parallel computing optimized , ASICs are dedicated, custom designed and optimized for one specific function (for e.g. bitcoin mining) whereas FPGAs are, as their name suggests, programmable digital logic cells. The hardware can be reprogrammed / repurposed to different workloads. Neither ASICs nor FPGAs have a predefined instruction set.

A very short history

Amazon launched EC2 with one instance type, m1, in the year 2006. This machine offered 1.7 GHz of CPU, 1.75 GB of RAM, 160 GB of disk and 250 Mbps of network bandwidth. This has evolved to 300+ instance types as of July 2020.

EC2 currently offers instance with upto 4.0GHz of CPU(z1d), 24576 GB / 24 TB of RAM(u-24tb1.metal), 48 TB of disk (d2.8xlarge) and 100 Gbps of Network bandwidth (High-Memory instances). Nitro turbo-charged this evolution in 2017 at which time “only” 42 instance types were available. It allowed new CPU architectures (ARM, AMD), bare metal offerings, 100 Gbps networking, EFA etc. So what exactly is Nitro?

Nitro — in english

Nitro refers to a whole fleet of changes, hardware and software, brought about in order to improve two important aspects of the infrastructure: performance and security. The basic idea is about offloading functions that are generally performed in a hypervisor stack to separate dedicated hardware / software component. Before Nitro — Networking, Storage, Security etc. were part of the hypervisor stack and contributed to about 30% of resource consumption that could not be used by customer instances.

With Nitro architecture, these components are moved out of the hypervisor stack, allowing for better resource consumption / performance and more controlled security.

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