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Amazon’s in-house developed ARM-powered Graviton2 processors will now be the default for its ElastiCache in-memory data store service.

Last week Amazon Web Services made an official announcement of the launch of ElastiCache for Redis and Memcached on Graviton2 M6g and R6g instance families.

ElastiCache is AWS’s in-memory-data-store-as-a-service and lets users create Redis or memcached implementations in the Amazonian cloud.

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 instances using the latest generation of its Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors back in June. AWS Graviton2 processors are custom built by AWS using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores. They deliver several performance optimizations over first-generation AWS Graviton processors.

A move that started last year

AWS had first championed ElastiCache on Graviton2 back in December 2019. In a blog post, Jeff Barr, AWS Chief Evangelist, announced that they had benchmarked Memcached-on-Arm. The results were that they saw 43 percent better performance and lower latency.

“We are planning to use these instances to power Amazon EMR, Amazon ElastiCache, and other AWS services,” Barr wrote.

Accordingly, AWS announced in last week’s post that ElastiCache now supports Graviton2-powered M6g and R6g instance types. According to Amazon, the ElastiCache solution delivers “up to a 45% price/performance improvement over previous generation instances.”

Why AWS’s own CPU is now the “default choice”

In addition, the post stated that “Graviton2 instances are now the default choice for ElastiCache customers.”

ElastiCache Graviton2 instances come in sizes large to 16xlarge that offer memory flexibility. The ElastiCache memory optimized R6g offer memory from 14.04 GiB to 450 GiB. The general purpose M6g cache instance offers memory that ranges from 6.85 GiB to 225 GiB.

The Graviton2-based instances leverage Nitro system and ENA (Elastic Network Adapter). They deliver higher network bandwidths on the smaller instances compared to R5 and M5 instance families, the company said.

ElastiCache Graviton2 instances also boast the latest Amazon Linux 2. This OS will replace Amazon Linux 1. Furthermore, Graviton2 instances support the latest versions of Redis and Memcached with a seamless upgrade from previous generation instances.  

The M6g and R6g instances are now available for Amazon ElastiCache in the AWS US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt and Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.