AWS has announced the general availability of its sixth generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, with three new instances powered by AWS-designed, Arm-based Graviton2 processors.
The new general purpose (M6g), compute-optimized (C6g), and memory-optimized (R6g) instances deliver up to 40% better price/performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances. These sixth generation Amazon EC2 instances include:
- M6g instances – designed for general-purpose workloads with balanced compute, memory, and networking, such as application servers, mid-size databases, microservices, and caching fleets.
- C6g instances – designed for compute-intensive workloads, such as high-performance computing, batch processing, video encoding, gaming, scientific modeling, distributed analytics, ad-serving, and CPU-based machine learning inference.
- R6g instances – designed for workloads that process large data sets in memory, such as open source databases (MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL) or in-memory caches (Redis, Memcached, and KeyDB), and real-time big data analytics.
“Today more than ever, customers are looking for innovative ways to increase performance and reduce cost, and Arm processors have emerged as an exciting and mainstream alternative to x86 processors for a wide variety of existing and emerging workloads,” said David Brown, Vice President, Amazon EC2, AWS. “The new Amazon EC2 instances powered by AWS-designed, Arm-based, Graviton2 processors represent a significant generational leap for customers, delivering 40% better price/performance over comparable x86-based instances, and already we’ve seen a broad set of customers embrace them across a wide variety of general purpose, compute optimized, and memory optimized workloads.”
AWS Graviton2 processors would introduce a number of “powerful” optimizations, features, and capabilities. AWS Graviton2 processors use 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS, built using advanced 7 nanometer manufacturing technology. When compared to the first generation Graviton processors, according to AWS, these AWS Graviton2 processors would provide 2x faster floating point performance per core for scientific and high performance computing workloads, optimized instructions for faster machine learning inference, custom hardware acceleration for compression workloads, always-on fully encrypted DDR4 memory, and 50% faster per core encryption performance to further enhance security.
AWS Graviton2-powered instances would provide up to 64 vCPUs, 25 Gbps of enhanced networking, and 19 Gbps of EBS bandwidth. Already, AWS services like Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce have found superior price/performance in testing, stated AWS, and plan to move the services into production on Graviton2-based instances in the coming months.
Datadog
Since their introduction a year ago, Arm-based Amazon EC2 A1 instances (powered by AWS’s first generation Graviton processor) have provided customers running scale-out workloads (e.g. containerized microservices and web tier applications) with significant cost savings, claims AWS.
Datadog, a global monitoring and analytics platform for developers, operations, and business users in the cloud age, is excited that the AWS Graviton2-based 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 AWS Graviton2 instance performance alongside the rest of their infrastructure.”
