The Nitro System supports key network, server, security, firmware patching, and monitoring functions freeing up the entire underlying server for customer use. This allows EC2 instances to have access to all cores – none need to be reserved for storage or network I/O. This both gives more resources over to our largest instance types for customer use – we don’t need to reserve resource for housekeeping, monitoring, security, network I/O, or storage. The Nitro System also makes possible the use of a very simple, light weight hypervisor that is just about always quiescent and it allows us to securely support bare metal instance types.

source: grugq