Amazon Web Services made EC2 C8i and C8i-flex generally available, powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors available only on AWS. AWS claims up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5× more memory bandwidth than the prior Intel generation, with initial availability in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio) and US West (Oregon). See the AWS News Blog for workload specifics.
C8i targets compute-intensive fleets where instruction throughput and memory access patterns bottleneck response times. The 2.5× bandwidth jump matters most when request handlers churn through large in-memory datasets or shuffle state across cores, scenarios common in API gateways under peak load and distributed caches serving hot keys.
Where it helps first
CPU-bound fleets, web and application tiers, Kafka and Elasticsearch ingest pipelines, API gateways, see the clearest gains, while cache and queue layers (e.g., Memcached) benefit from the expanded memory bandwidth that cuts serialization stalls.
How to migrate
Deploy a canary subset on C8i or C8i-flex, compare p95 latency and cost per request against your existing C7i or C7i-flex baseline, then scale the winner across production once metrics confirm the improvement holds under real traffic patterns.
Cost posture
Mix C8i-flex for baseline and C8i for bursts; align with Savings Plans after A/Bs. C8i-flex is positioned for baseline price-performance on steady workloads, with standard C8i reserved for bursts.
Teams running high-throughput services should prioritize tiers where per-request latency drives infrastructure spend, cutting tail latencies can reduce instance counts and monthly costs without re-architecting application logic.
