Introducing Amazon EC2 A1 Instances Powered By New Arm-based AWS Graviton Processors

Posted on: Nov 26, 2018

Amazon EC2 A1 instances deliver significant cost savings and are ideally suited for scale-out and Arm-based workloads that are supported by the extensive Arm ecosystem. A1 instances are the first EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton Processors that feature 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS.

AWS Graviton processors are a new line of processors that are custom designed by AWS utilizing Amazon’s extensive expertise in building platform solutions for cloud applications running at scale. These processors deliver targeted power, performance, and cost optimizations. A1 instances deliver cost savings for customer workloads that can run Arm instructions and fit within the available A1 memory footprint. These include applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, caching fleets, distributed data stores, as well as development environments. These instances will also appeal to developers, enthusiasts, and educators across the Arm developer community. Most applications that make use of open source software like Apache HTTP Server, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python, NodeJS, and Java easily run on multiple processor architectures due to the support of Linux based operating systems. If you're primarily using open source packages from your favorite Linux distribution or building your own applications from source, we encourage you to give the new A1 instances a try. A1 instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which maximizes resource efficiency for customers while still supporting familiar AWS and Amazon EC2 instance capabilities such as EBS, Networking, and AMIs. Amazon Linux 2, Red Hat Enterpise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu and ECS optimized AMIs are available today for A1 instances.  

Amazon EC2 A1 instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) Regions. These instances are available in 5 sizes, with 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 vCPUs and are purchasable as On-Demand, Reserved or Spot Instances.To get started, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit the Amazon EC2 A1 instance page.