Hi, I'm one of the engineers at Amazon working on EC2.
You can also run get bare metal I3 instances by launching the "i3.metal" instance type. You don't need to wait for the Nitro hypervisor, you can go with no hypervisor at all.
When we first launched the i3 instances, i3.metals weren't available. We've been wanting to do experiments with i3.metals, but we've been unable to get confirmation that our reservations will transfer over. Until we know that we'll be able to transfer the reservations, there isn't any reason for us to do experiments.
Since you work at Amazon, do you have a sense of big of a difference there is in performance between i3 and i3.metal for database workloads like Postgres?
And you get 4 extra cores and 24 gigs of ram "for free" vs i3.16xl (which is what we use). I think we looked into switching but it wasn't clear if the reservations could be switched over.
You can also run get bare metal I3 instances by launching the "i3.metal" instance type. You don't need to wait for the Nitro hypervisor, you can go with no hypervisor at all.