Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is getting three new instance families powered by the latest AWS Graviton4 processors. Specifically, these are the compute-optimized C8gd, the general-purpose M8gd, and the memory-optimized R8gd instances.
All instances are equipped with local storage based on NVMe SSD. Amazon says these instances offer significant performance improvements over the previous Graviton3 instances. For general computing tasks, performance is said to be up to 30 percent better. For database workloads with high storage traffic, Amazon reports up to 40 percent better performance. For I/O-intensive real-time data analysis, query results can be up to 20 percent faster.
These new instances are also larger in every respect. Users can get up to three times more vCPUs, with a maximum of 192. Memory also triples to a maximum of 1.5 TiB. Local storage is also up to three times larger, up to 11.4 TB of NVMe SSD storage. Memory bandwidth is 75 percent higher and there is twice as much L2 cache compared to the Graviton3 versions. All this extra capacity helps process larger data volumes and scale applications.
Significantly more bandwidth
Network bandwidth is now up to 50 Gbps and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth is up to 40 Gbps, a significant jump from Graviton3 instances. Amazon also offers the option to adjust network and EBS bandwidth by up to 25 percent via a bandwidth weighting configuration, allowing you to tailor performance to specific workloads.
Amazon positions these Graviton4 instances as suitable for storage-intensive Linux-based applications, such as applications built with containers and microservices using tools such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) or Docker.
Applications written in popular programming languages such as C/C++, Java, Python, and others should also perform well. Amazon specifically mentions that Graviton4 processors are up to 30 percent faster for web applications, 40 percent faster for databases, and 45 percent faster for large Java applications than Graviton3 processors.
Special hardware and software
The new instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, which uses special hardware and software to take over virtualization, storage, and networking tasks for better performance and security. In terms of security, Graviton4 processors encrypt all high-speed physical hardware interfaces.
These instances are available in 10 different sizes per family, plus two bare-metal configurations. The M8gd, C8gd, and R8gd instances are now available in the US East (N. Virginia, Ohio) and US West (Oregon) regions. Users can purchase them as On-Demand instances, through Savings Plans, Spot instances, or as Dedicated instances or Dedicated hosts. You can launch them through the AWS Management Console, CLI, or SDKs.