What is Amazon Elastic Inference?

• Amazon Elastic Inference (EI) allows you to attach GPU-powered acceleration to existing EC2 instances, Amazon SageMaker instances, or ECS tasks.
• It provides flexibility by letting you add just the right amount of GPU acceleration instead of overprovisioning with an entire dedicated GPU instance.

Strengths

• Cost Reduction: EI can significantly reduce the cost of running deep learning inference workloads compared to dedicated GPU instances. You pay only for the GPU resources you need.
• Flexibility: Choose the right amount of GPU acceleration to match your workload's specific requirements.
• Ease of Integration: Easily attach EI accelerators to existing EC2, SageMaker, or ECS instances without major code changes.
• Broad Instance Compatibility: Works with a range of CPU instance types across various families.

Weaknesses

• Limited Performance: EI accelerators might offer lower overall power than full-fledged GPU instances (like P3 or G4 instances).
• Availability: Not all instance families may be compatible with EI.
• Network Overhead: Some latency overhead is introduced due to the network communication between the EC2 instance and the EI accelerator.
• Sunset of Service: AWS will stop onboarding new customers to EI starting April 15, 2023. Existing customers have time to migrate their workloads.

Real-World Use Case: Batch Image Processing

1. Varying Inference Needs: You have a task to process a large batch of images using a deep learning model, but the needed level of GPU acceleration varies depending on image complexity.
2. Cost Optimization: Attaching EI accelerators to general-purpose EC2 instances allows you to provision the appropriate level of GPU power on-demand, paying only for what you use instead of dedicated GPU instances that may be underutilized.
3. Scalability: You can horizontally scale your EC2 instances with EI accelerators, ensuring capacity for processing large image batches.

Important Notes

• AWS is encouraging migration from EI to alternatives like Inf1 instances within SageMaker, which offer improved performance and cost-effectiveness for inference.
• Always consult the latest documentation for AWS's recommendations and available inference options: https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/elastic-inference/