AWS's High I/O Quadruple Extra Large instance in Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) includes 2TB of local SSD-backed storage with 60.5GB of RAM running on eight virtual cores. AWS says it can achieve as many as 120,000 random read input/output operations per second (IOPS) and between 10,000 and 85,000 write IOPS. In , Amazon officials wrote that it's aimed at NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB.

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AWS makes weekly, if not daily, updates to its cloud offering but Paul Burns, an analyst at Neovise, says this is one of AWS's more significant updates. "There are all kinds of great use cases for something like this," he says. are often bottlenecked by the their access to databases, he says, and having high capacity compute power, particularly with 2TB of SSD-backed disks, could help speed database processing for customers.

AWS is not the first company to offer SSD-backed compute instances: Softlayer, for example, has such an offering. And AWS isn't the first to offer high-capacity local storage either. Managed dedicated hosting providers such as TORQHost and Ajubeo each have high-capacity options. But AWS's offering appears to be one of the highest capacity SSD-backed cloud-based services, meaning that it's instantly accessible via APIs, Burns says.