Always looking to stay ahead of its rivals, Amazon Web Services Inc. has updated its “burstable general-purpose instances” for its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud service in order to provide better performance for next-generation software applications.

Amazon’s new T3 instances are the successor to its previous-generation T2 instances. The company describes them as “burstable” because they’re designed to provide bursts of processing power when applications experience spikes in demand, something that’s common with things such as microservices, which are the components of containerized applications.

T3 instances are also useful for low-latency interactive applications, databases virtual desktops, business critical apps and other workloads that need to scale up and down rapidly. “T3 instances enable customers’ applications to burst seamlessly to meet temporary traffic peaks and then scale back down to operate at typical traffic levels,” the company said in a statement.

Amazon said the T3 instances are powered by Intel Corp.’s most advanced Xeon Scalable processors, providing up to 30 percent better price-performance than the older T2s. Another useful feature of the T3s is that they will sustain their highest level of performance indefinitely, even if the instance exceeds its available CPU credits. Although this behavior was available with the T2s, it wasn’t activated by default, as it is with the newer instances.

“Customers sometimes didn’t realize that this important performance benefit was available to them,” Amazon said. “Based on customer feedback, T3 instances have this valuable unlimited burst capability enabled by default, so customers need not take any special action to enjoy this benefit.”

In a blog post, Amazon Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr said the T3s are available with on-demand pricing starting at $0.0052 per hour, or $3.796 per month. There are a number of options to choose from, however, with different pricing based on the number of cores and memory used:

“These are superpopular instances as they allow customers to burst loads created by dynamic infrastructures, such as microservices for example,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “It’s always good to see infrastructure-as-a-service vendors invest in innovation. In this case, AWS gives CxOs more flexibility to deploy even more powerful and elastic next-generation apps.”

The T3 instances can be launched from Amazon’s Management Console or the Amazon EC2 Command Line Interface, as well as software development kits and third-party libraries.

The instances are first being made available in Amazon regions U.S. East (Ohio, northern Virginia), U.S. West (northern California, Oregon), Europe (Ireland, London and Frankfurt), South America (Sao Paulo), Canada (Central) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Singapore and Sydney).

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