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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has officially launched X1 instances for its EC2 cloud, which claim to have the most memory available in any SAP-certified cloud instance available today.

The instances have 2 terabytes of memory each and are, according to Amazon, a good fit for programmes such as the SAP HANA in-memory database, big data processing engines such as Apache Spark and Presto, as well as other high performance computing workloads. The memory available in X1 is eight times more than in any other instance on EC2.

“Amazon EC2 provides the most comprehensive selection of instances, offering customers, by far, the deepest compute functionality to support any workload,” said Matt Garman, Amazon EC2 VP in a statement. “XI instances change the game for SAP workloads in the cloud. Now, for the first time, customers can run their most memory-intensive applications at scale with the elasticity, flexibility, and reliability of the AWS Cloud, rather than having to battle the complexity, cost, and lack of agility of colo or on-premises solutions.”

This is not the first time AWS has waxed lyrical over SAP this week; earlier the cloud giant issued a release which noted a significant increase of customers running SAP applications on the AWS cloud. No specifics on numbers were given, but customers include GE Oil & Gas, Kellogg’s, and Zappos.com.

AWS as we know it turned 10 years old back in March, and still continues to be seen as the darling of the industry with a significant – almost unsurpassable – lead in infrastructure as a service and, in the words of Ian Moyse, Cloud Industry Forum and Eurocloud board member, taken companies such as Microsoft with it more quickly than expected.

X1 instances are available upon request to AWS customers in selected US, EU, and Asia Pacific regions, with the service being rolled out to more regions in the coming months.