We are pleased to announce support for many new node types and sizes across AWS and GCP cloud service providers for our Instaclustr for Apache Kafka® and Kafka® Connect offerings. 

Each cloud service provider is continually introducing new and improved nodes. To provide our customers with a range of options to suit their specific workloads, we regularly review and roll out updates to the range of nodes we support. 

In the current instance, we have extended our Managed Kafka and dedicated ZooKeeper™ and Kafka Connect offerings on GCP by introducing support for n2-standard and n2-highmem nodes with zonal disks. More specifically, with support for various storage capacities and across developer and production tiers, we have now added support for: 

• Kafka: n2-standard-2, n2-highmem-2, n2-highmem-4 and n2-highmem-8 
• Dedicated ZooKeeper: n2-standard-2 and n2-standard-4 
• Kafka Connect: n2-standard-2, n2-standard-4, n2-standard-8 and n2-standard-16 

The N2 are the latest generation of general-purpose machines offered by GCP and run on newer processors compared to the N1. We expect that they will offer improved price/performance for many Kafka workloads. In addition, for the high memory versions, n2-highmem-x, compared to its equivalent n1-highmem-x you’ll also benefit from an increase in the available memory. For example, while the n1-highmem-8 comes with 52GB of memory, the equivalent n2-highmem-8 offers 64GB. 

Alongside this, based on customer demand, we’ve started supporting a new GCP region, eu-west-8, located in Milan, Italy. 

We also have great news for customers using Instaclustr for Apache Kafka on AWS, where support for larger storage sizes for the r6g.large and the r6g.xlarge will open up new options for our customers. While previously the largest storage sizes they came with were 1200GB and 2400GB respectively, they will now also support 1600G and 3200GB respectively.