AWS Graviton Processor
Enabling the best price performance in Amazon EC2
AWS Graviton processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2. Amazon EC2 provides the broadest and deepest portfolio of compute instances, including many that are powered by latest-generation Intel and AMD processors. AWS Graviton processors add even more choice to help customers optimize performance and cost for their workloads.
The first-generation AWS Graviton processors power Amazon EC2 A1 instances, the first ever Arm-based instances on AWS. These instances deliver significant cost savings over other general-purpose instances for scale-out applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, data/log processing, and other workloads that can run on smaller cores and fit within the available memory footprint.
AWS Graviton2 processors deliver a major leap in performance and capabilities over first-generation AWS Graviton processors. They power Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances, and their variants with local NVMe-based SSD storage, that provide up to 40% better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances1 for a wide variety of workloads, including application servers, micro-services, high-performance computing, electronic design automation, gaming, open-source databases, and in-memory caches. The AWS Graviton2 processors also provide enhanced performance for video encoding workloads, hardware acceleration for compression workloads, and support for CPU-based machine learning inference. They deliver 7x more performance, 4x more compute cores, 5x faster memory, and 2x larger caches.
Benefits
Best price performance for a broad spectrum of workloads
AWS Graviton2-based general-purpose (M6g), compute-optimized (C6g), and memory-optimized (R6g) EC2 instances and their variants with NVMe-based SSD storage deliver up to 40% better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances1 for a broad spectrum of workloads such as application servers, microservices, video encoding, high-performance computing, electronic design automation, compression, gaming, open-source databases, in-memory caches, and CPU-based machine learning inference.
Extensive ecosystem support
AWS Graviton2 processors, based on the 64-bit Arm architecture, are supported by popular Linux operating systems including Amazon Linux 2, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu. Many popular applications and services from AWS and Independent Software Vendors also support AWS Graviton2-based instances, including Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECR, Amazon CodeBuild, Amazon CodeCommit, Amazon CodePipeline, Amazon CodeDeploy, Amazon CloudWatch, Crowdstrike, Datadog, Docker, Drone, Dynatrace, GitLab, Jenkins, NGINX, Qualys, Rancher, Rapid7, Tenable, and TravisCI. Arm developers can also leverage this ecosystem to build applications natively in the cloud, thereby eliminating the need for emulation and cross-compilation, which are error prone and time consuming.
Enhanced security for cloud applications
Developers building applications for the cloud rely on cloud infrastructure for security, speed and optimal resource footprint. AWS Graviton2 processors feature key capabilities that enable developers to run cloud native applications securely, and at scale, including always-on 256-bit DRAM encryption and 50% faster per core encryption performance compared to first-generation AWS Graviton. Graviton2 powered instances are built on the Nitro System that features the Nitro security chip with dedicated hardware and software for security functions, and support for encrypted EBS storage volumes by default.
EC2 Instances Powered by AWS Graviton2
General Purpose
Best price performance for general purpose workloads with balanced compute, memory, and networking
Built for: General-purpose workloads such as application servers, mid-size data stores, microservices, and cluster computing.
Compute Optimized
Best price performance for compute-intensive workloads
Built for: Compute-intensive applications such as high performance computing, video encoding, gaming, and CPU-based machine learning inference acceleration.
Memory Optimized
Best price performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory
Built for: Memory-intensive workloads such as open-source databases (MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL), or in-memory caches (Redis, KeyDB, Memcached).
Local NVMe-based SSD storage options are also available in general purpose (M6gd), compute-optimized (C6gd), and memory-optimized (R6gd) instances.
EC2 Instances Powered by First Generation AWS Graviton
Amazon EC2 A1 Instances, powered by first-generation AWS Graviton processors, deliver significant cost savings over other general-purpose instances scale-out applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, data/log processing, and other workloads that can run on smaller cores and fit within the available memory footprint. These instances will also appeal to developers, enthusiasts, and educators across the Arm community.
Customer and Partner Testimonials
CrowdStrike is a global cybersecurity leader in cloud-delivered endpoint protection built from the ground up to stop breaches. CrowdStrike Falcon delivers full spectrum runtime protection and visibility for hosts and hosted containers leveraging a cloud-native platform and a single lightweight sensor, without requiring any additional deployments or integrations. AWS Graviton2 Arm64-based instances offer compelling performance and cost benefits which will help drive adoption across a much wider variety of workloads. Under the shared responsibility model, AWS customers require consistent and seamless protection across their Amazon EC2 compute fleet, regardless of the underlying processor architectures. That is why CrowdStrike is delighted to extend CrowdStrike Falcon protection and visibility for all Graviton-based EC2 instances.
Datadog is the monitoring and analytics platform for developers, operations, and business users in the cloud age. "We're excited the Graviton2 instances are now generally available. We've seen our own developer productivity increase as these instances have boosted the performance of key continuous integration pipelines by 50%," said Jimmy Caputo, Product Manager at Datadog. "With the Datadog Agent for Graviton / Arm, all AWS customers can use Datadog to monitor the Graviton2 instance performance alongside the rest of their infrastructure.“
Honeycomb.io provides an observability tool for introspecting and interrogating production systems, designed and evolved to meet the needs of platforms, microservices, serverless apps, and complex systems. Honeycomb.io is running Amazon EC2 M6g instances for their ingest worker test fleet. The entire transition process took about 15 hours by an experienced generalist systems engineer/SRE. Comparing to existing C5 instances, Honeycomb.io observed M6g instances to be superior in every aspect—they cost less, have more RAM, exhibit lower median and significantly narrower tail latency, and run cooler with the same proportional workload per host. Converting the entire ingest worker fleet to M6g instances has allowed Honeycomb.io to run 30% fewer instances, and each instance costs 10% less.
Hotelbeds is the world's leading bedbank, redefining accommodation, transfers, activities and car rental products with a global network of travel distributors. Hotelbeds is constantly exploring new technologies to ensure they offer the best products and services to their customers. Hotelbeds were excited to test out the new AWS Graviton2 processors for one of the workloads developed using Java11 + SpringBoot2. Hotelbeds' initial testing shows that the Amazon EC2 M6g instances based on AWS Graviton2 deliver up to 43% better price performance vs. the current generation M5 instances. Based on these results Hotelbeds looks forward to using M6g instances as part of its Amazon EC2 infrastructure.
InterSystems, aims to offer its data platform customers the freedom with both technologies and architectures. InterSystems benchmarks show that the new AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 M6g instances offer up to 28% higher performance at a 20% lower infrastructure cost compared to similar-sized M5 instances. These compelling results led InterSystems to add support for the Arm architecture and AWS Graviton2-based instances in the latest version of InterSystems IRIS data platform.
KeyDB is a high performance database compatible with the Redis™ API and focused on multithreading, memory efficiency and high throughput. KeyDB is excited to offer support for AWS Graviton2 instances and encourage users to see what a KeyDB + Graviton2 setup can offer. KeyDB testing has shown performance gains as high as 65% using AWS Graviton2-powered Amazon M6g instances compared to the latest generation x86-based M5 instances. KeyDB is proud to support the latest technology and provide the most powerful solutions available to its users.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions is a global data and analytics company that provides data and technology services, analytics, predictive insights, and fraud prevention for a wide range of industries.
"We tested our Java application based on OpenJDK8 on the Amazon EC2 M6g instances. This application handles a significant amount of encryption processes and is used to provide message level encryption to meet the security needs of our customers. Compared to our baseline C5 instance, the M6g instance was able to handle 30% more traffic. These are very exciting results."
Tim Miller, Senior Consulting Software Engineer - Health Care segment of LexisNexis Risk Solutions
Mobiuspace is a startup that provides an advanced AI-based content discovery and entertainment platform. Mobiuspace recently tested its Java-based containerized backend services on the new AWS Graviton2 based Amazon EC2 M6g instances and observed a performance improvement of 40% compared to the M5 instances. Due to this performance improvement and the 20% lower price of Amazon EC2 M6g instances, Mobiuspace is looking forward to adopting them.
Netflix is the world's leading internet entertainment service with 158 million memberships in 190 countries enjoying TV series, documentaries, and feature films across a wide variety of genres and languages. “We use Amazon EC2 M instance types for a number of workloads inclusive of our streaming, encoding, data processing, and monitoring applications,” said Ed Hunter, Director of Performance and operating systems at Netflix. “We tested the new M6g instances using industry standard LMbench and certain Java benchmarks and saw up to 50% improvement over M5 instances. We’re excited about the introduction of AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 instances.”
Nielsen is a global measurement and data analytics company that provides the most complete and trusted view available of consumers and markets worldwide. “Our OpenJDK based Java application is used to collect digital data, process incoming web requests, and redirect requests based on business needs. The application is I/O intensive and scaling out in a cost-effective manner is a key requirement,” said Chris Nicotra, SVP Digital, at Nielsen. “We seamlessly transferred this Java application to Amazon EC2 A1 instances powered by the AWS Graviton processor. We’ve since tested the new Graviton2-based M6g instances and it was able to handle twice the load of an A1. We look forward to running more workloads on the new Graviton2-based instances.”
Plurk develops and operates a social media site that allows people to showcase the events that make up their life in deliciously digestible chunks. As part of its stack Plurk operates a Memcached fleet to ensure a great user experience. Plurk is born in the cloud, and has been running Memcached on Amazon EC2 instances since its early days. When Plurk heard about AWS Graviton2 it was excited to see how it would perform for the Memcached workload fleet. The transition to AWS Graviton2-based EC2 instances has been seamless and Plurk reduced its processor load by 15% and cost by 20%. Based on this positive experience, Plurk is evaluating other workloads to transition to AWS Graviton2 for additional price/performance benefits.
Raygun provides visibility into how users are really experiencing software thereby enabling its customers to detect, diagnose and resolve issues with greater speed and accuracy. For Raygun's compute centric .NET Core based workloads that were tested on the new Graviton2 based M6g instances, Raygun is excited to see a 30% performance gain over the existing 5th generation instances are currently used in production today. In this challenging climate Raygun's focus is to look for cost efficiencies, so Raygun is very excited about being able to utilize these instances in production now they are generally available.
Redbox is America’s leading source for affordable new release movie rentals and TV shows, without a subscription. Redbox operates more than 41,500 conveniently located, self-service entertainment kiosks and run nightly inventory forecasts to ensure customers get the movies they want, when they want them. The forecasting algorithm is mostly compute bound and runs on C5 instances today. When Redbox saw the AWS Graviton2 announcement they were keen to test the new Amazon EC2 M6g instances to see how they perform for this use case. Comparing m5.2xlarge vs m6g.2xlarge Redbox found the performance was almost identical but the M6g is 20% lower cost. Redbox is impressed that Graviton2 is trading blows with x86 in the server space.
Arm Treasure Data Customer Data Platform (CDP) enables the unification of data from different sources and reduces the need for data cleaning and preparation. This big data heavy workload runs on AWS, supported by open-source middleware such as Presto. Based on internal tests, the Amazon EC2 M6g instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors provide 30% better performance and 20% better cost benefits compared to M5 instances.
Valnet Inc. is a digital media company that specializes in content distribution.
"With a portfolio of high volume sites like Screen Rant, TheGamer and CBR, a well optimized EC2 infrastructure is a fundamental part of our business. After benchmarking our most common workloads (NGINX, PHP, Redis) we found the new AWS Graviton2 based Amazon EC2 M6g instances demonstrated up to 30% increased performance over our current M5 fleet. We have since made a complete transition to M6g with 20% fewer instances, 20% lower cost for an overall 40% better price performance."
Stefan Sjogelid, System Administrator - Valnet Inc.
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Partner Blogs
May 26, 2020
May 21, 2020
Observations on Arm64 and AWS’s Amazon EC2 M6g instances
Liz Fong-Jones (Honeycomb.io)
Mar 18,2020
Benchmarking the AWS Graviton2 with KeyDB – M6g up to 65% faster
Ben Schermel (EQAlpha)
Mar 2, 2020
Intersystems IRIS on Arm-based AWS Graviton2 Processors
Steve LeBlanc (InterSystems)
Feb 19, 2020
Building multi-architecture Docker images on Arm 64-bit AWS Graviton processors
Scott Rossillo
Jan 14, 2020
Articles and announcements
Andrei Frumusanu (Anandtech)
Mar 10, 2020
Patrick Moorhead
Dec 3, 2019
Resources
1 20% lower cost and up to 40% higher performance for M6g, C6g, and R6g instances over M5, C5, and R5 instances respectively, based on internal testing of workloads with varying characteristics of compute and memory requirements.