New – Amazon EC2 Instances based on AWS Graviton2 with local NVMe-based SSD storage

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post to announce the new AWS Graviton2 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance type, the M6g. Since then, hundreds of customers have observed significant cost-performance benefits. These include Honeycomb.io, SmugMug, Redbox, and Valnet Inc.

On June 11, we announced two new families of instances based on AWS Graviton2 processors: the C6g and R6g, in addition of the existing M6g. The M family instances are work horses intended to address a broad array of general-purpose workloads such as application servers, gaming servers, midsize databases, caching fleets, web tier, and the likes. The C family of instances is well suited for compute-intensive workloads, such as high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, ad serving, video encoding, gaming, scientific modeling, distributed analytics, and CPU-based machine learning inference. The R family of instances is well suited for memory-intensive workloads, such as open-source databases, in-memory caches, or real-time big data analysis. To learn more about these instance types and why they are relevant for your workloads, you can hear more about them in this video from James Hamilton, VP & Distinguished Engineer at AWS.

Today, I have additional news to share with you: we are adding a “d” variant to all three families. The M6gd, C6gd, and R6gd instance types have NVM Express (NVMe) locally attached SSD drives, up to 2 x 1.9 TB. They offer 50% more storage GB/vCPU compared to M5d, C5d, and R5d instances. These are a great fit for applications that need access to high-speed, low latency local storage including those that need temporary storage of data for scratch space, temporary files, and caches. The data on an instance store volume persists only during the life of the associated EC2 instance.

Instance types based on Graviton2 processors deliver up to 40% better price performance than their equivalent x86-based M5, C5, and R5 families.

All AWS Graviton2 based instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a collection of AWS-designed hardware and software that allows the delivery of isolated multi-tenancy, private networking, and fast local storage. These instances provide up to 19 Gbps Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth and up to 25 Gbps network bandwidth.

Partner ecosystem support for these Arm-based AWS Graviton2 instances is robust, from Linux distributions (Amazon Linux 2, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Ubuntu, or FreeBSD), to language runtimes (Java with Amazon Corretto, Node.js, Python, Go,…), container services (Docker, Amazon Elastic Container Service, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, Amazon Elastic Container Registry), agents (Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Systems Manager, Amazon Inspector), developer tools (AWS Code Suite, Jenkins, GitLab, Chef, Drone.io, Travis CI), and security & monitoring solutions (such as Datadog, Dynatrace, Crowdstrike, Qualys, Rapid7, Tenable, or Honeycomb.io).

Here is a table to summarize the technical characteristics of each instance type in these families.

These M6g, C6g, and R6g families of instances are available for you today in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Ireland). Their disk-based variants M6gd, C6gd, and R6gd are available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio) and Europe (Ireland) AWS Regions.

If you are optimizing applications for Arm architecture, be sure to have a look at our Getting Started collection of resources or learn more about AWS Graviton2 based EC2 instances.

Let us know your feedback!

— seb