Amazon Web Services Inc. this week added five new bare-metal instance options to its Elastic Compute Cloud, its main cloud computing platform.

The new bare-metal instance types — bare-metal meaning they’re provided without installed software — are designed for workloads that need to access the processor and underlying hardware directly, while ensuring elasticity, scalability and security.

The instances include the new M5 and M5d, which are meant for general-purpose workloads such as application and web servers, gaming servers, caching fleets and app development. The others include the memory optimized R5 and R5d instances, which are best suited for high performance databases; and the Z1d instance type, which is designed for high frequency and compute performance workloads.

Amazon’s cloud unit said each of these workloads can benefit from the deep performance analysis tools that the new instances provide. Each of the new instances is powered by Amazon’s Nitro System, which is a collection of hardware and software components that are supposed to eliminate virtualization overheads, the company said.

“These instances are ideal for workloads that require access to the hardware feature set, for applications that need to run in non-virtualized environments for licensing or support requirements, or for customers who wish to use their own hypervisor,” AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr said in a blog post.

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