Amazon’s C4 cloud-computing instances may launch soon

Amazon Web Services, the leader in the market for public cloud infrastructure, is getting ready to release its latest server slices to developers the world over.

The C4 instances, first announced in November, will launch in seven regions, according to a blog post that went out in an RSS feed but is now unavailable online. (Update: Amazon finally published that blog post and launched the C4 instances 10 days after VentureBeat published this article.)

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The C4 instances run on Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (Haswell) chips customized exclusively for Amazon, according to the blog post, written by Amazon Web Services chief evangelist Jeff Barr. And prices, which were not released in November, are now available. Here are the prices for the instances in Amazon’s U.S. East region in Northern Virginia and the U.S. West region in Oregon:

Prices for the C4 instances in other regions are not yet posted on the page that lists all available EC2 instances from Amazon.

These instances pack serious compute power relative to memory- or storage-optimized instances Amazon has introduced into its data centers in the past couple of years. Meanwhile, other cloud providers, like Google and Microsoft, have also been rapidly refreshing the chips inside the data centers from which they provide their public clouds.

These companies all compete on features and prices as well; expect announcements from Amazon and the other cloud providers all throughout 2015.