Introducing Amazon EC2 D3 instances for warm and cold tiers in Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud

We are excited to announce the availability of Amazon EC2 D3 instances in Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud. The Amazon D family of instances is the underlying infrastructure for our warm and cold data tiers in Elasticsearch Service deployments running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

D3 instances are now powering all new warm and cold nodes in our largest AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), and Europe (Ireland). As AWS makes D3 instances available in more regions, we plan to make them available in these regions to our Elastic Cloud customers.

D3 is part of AWS’s next generation of dense HDD storage instances, and it offers higher processing capacity, up to 30% higher storage capacity (by RAID configuration optimization), and lower costs compared to the previous D2 generation. D3 instances also offer 2.5 times higher networking speed and 45% higher disk throughput.

In terms of disk capacity, D3 offers a denser storage with a RAM-to-disk ratio of 1:190, compared to 1:160 for D2. This results in a 24–34% lower price per GB of storage.

The launch of D3 instances in the listed AWS regions is part of our ongoing commitment to make the newest and most cost-effective instance types in each cloud provider available to Elastic Cloud customers. 

It’s easy to get started. Log in to the Elastic Cloud console and create a deployment. Select one of the AWS regions supporting D3, and you can automatically take advantage of greater performance and lower costs with Amazon EC2 D3 instances.