AMD SEV-SNP for Amazon EC2 instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Concepts and terminologyRequirementsConsiderationsPricing

AMD SEV-SNP for Amazon EC2 instances

AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (AMD SEV-SNP) is a CPU feature that provides the following properties:

  • Attestation – AMD SEV-SNP enables you to retrieve a signed attestation report that contains a cryptographic measure that can be used to validate the instance’s state and identity, and that it is running on genuine AMD hardware. For more information, see Attest an Amazon EC2 instance with AMD SEV-SNP.

  • Memory encryption – Starting with AMD EPYC (Milan), AWS Graviton2, and Intel Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) processors, instance memory is always encrypted. Instances that are enabled for AMD SEV-SNP use an instance-specific key for their memory encryption.

Topics

Concepts and terminology

Before you begin using AMD SEV-SNP, ensure that you are familiar with the following concepts and terminology.

AMD SEV-SNP attestation report

The AMD SEV-SNP attestation report is a document that an instance can request from the CPU. The AMD SEV-SNP attestation report can be used to validate the state and identity of an instance, and to verify that it is running in a sanctioned AMD environment. The report includes a launch measurement, which is a cryptographic hash of the initial boot state of an instance, including its initial instance memory contents and initial state of the vCPUs. The AMD SEV-SNP attestation report is signed with a VLEK signature that chains back to an AMD root of trust.

VLEK

The Versioned Loaded Endorsement Key (VLEK) is a versioned signing key that is certified by AMD and used by the AMD CPU to sign the AMD SEV-SNP attestation reports. VLEK signatures can be validated using certificates provided by AMD.

OVMF binary

The Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) is the early-boot code that is used to provide a UEFI environment for the instance. The early-boot code is run before the code in the AMI is booted. The OVMF also finds and runs the boot loader provided in the AMI. For more information, see the OVMF repository.

Requirements

To use AMD SEV-SNP, you must do the following:

  • Use one of the following supported instance types:

    • General purpose: m6a.large | m6a.xlarge | m6a.2xlarge | m6a.4xlarge | m6a.8xlarge

    • Compute optimized: c6a.large | c6a.xlarge | c6a.2xlarge | c6a.4xlarge | c6a.8xlarge | c6a.12xlarge | c6a.16xlarge

    • Memory optimized: r6a.large | r6a.xlarge | r6a.2xlarge | r6a.4xlarge

  • Launch your instance in a supported AWS Region. Currently, only US East (Ohio) and Europe (Ireland) are supported.

  • Use an AMI with uefi or uefi-preferred boot mode and an operating system that supports AMD SEV-SNP. For more information about AMD SEV-SNP support on your operating system, refer to the respective operating system's documentation. For AWS, AMD SEV-SNP is supported on AL2023, RHEL 9.3, SLES 15 SP4, and Ubuntu 23.04 and later.

Considerations

You can only enable AMD SEV-SNP when you launch an instance. When AMD SEV-SNP is enabled for your instance launch, the following rules apply.

  • Once it is enabled, AMD SEV-SNP can't be disabled. It remains enabled throughout the instance lifecycle.

  • You can only change the instance type to another instance type that supports AMD SEV-SNP.

  • Hibernation and Nitro Enclaves aren't supported.

  • Dedicated Hosts aren't supported.

  • If the underlying host for your instance is scheduled for maintenance, you'll receive a scheduled event notification 14 days before the event. You must manually stop or restart your instance to move it to a new host.

Pricing

When you launch an Amazon EC2 instance with AMD SEV-SNP enabled, you are charged an additional hourly usage fee that is equivalent to 10 percent of the On-Demand hourly rate of the selected instance type.

This AMD SEV-SNP usage fee is a separate charge to your Amazon EC2 instance usage. Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and operating system usage don't impact this fee.

If you configure a Spot Instance to launch with AMD SEV-SNP enabled, you are charged an additional hourly usage fee that is equivalent to 10 percent of the On-Demand hourly rate of the selected instance type. If the allocation strategy uses price as an input, Spot Fleet does not include this additional fee; only the Spot price is used.