Posted On: May 11, 2020
Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6g instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors are generally available. Amazon EC2 M6g instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over the current generation x86-based Amazon EC2 M5 instances for a broad set of general-purpose workloads including, application servers, microservices, gaming servers, small and mid-size databases, and caching fleets.
AWS Graviton2 processors are custom-built by AWS using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to enable the best price performance for cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2. They deliver a major leap in performance and capabilities over first-generation AWS Graviton processors, with 7x performance, 4x the number of compute cores, 2x larger caches, and 5x faster memory. AWS Graviton2 processors feature always-on 256-bit DRAM encryption and 50% faster per core encryption performance compared to the first-generation AWS Graviton processors.
Amazon EC2 M6g instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a collection of AWS-designed hardware and software innovations that enable the delivery of efficient, flexible, and secure cloud services with isolated multi-tenancy, private networking, and fast local storage. These instances support up to 19 Gbps Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth and up to 25 Gbps network bandwidth. The M6g instances are supported by a broad ecosystem of operating systems and services from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) as well as AWS. These include popular Linux distributions (Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Fedora, Debian, and FreeBSD), the Amazon Corretto distribution of OpenJDK, container services (Amazon ECR, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Docker, and Rancher), agents (Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Systems Manager, Amazon Inspector, Crowdstrike, Datadog, Honeycomb.io, Qualys, Rapid7, and Tenable), and developer/automation tools (AWS Code Suite, Chef, GitLab, Jenkins, and TravisCI). The M6g instances have been available in preview since their announcement at re:Invent 2019, with hundreds of customers participating in the preview program. Most preview customers successfully tested their workloads on M6g with minimal effort and have benchmarked up to 40% better performance on M6g instances over comparable current generation x86-based instances, in addition to realizing 20% lower cost versus same-sized M5 instances. The Amazon EC2 M6g webpage outlines several such customer examples.
The M6g instances are now available in the AWS US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt and Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions. They are available in 8 sizes, with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48, and 64 vCPUs in addition to being available in bare metal, and are purchasable On-Demand, as Reserved instances, as Spot instances, or as part of Savings Plans.
To get started with Amazon EC2 M6g instances, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit the Amazon EC2 M6g instance page or the Getting Started Github page. Additional Amazon EC2 instances based on the AWS Graviton2 processors, including compute optimized C6g, memory optimized R6g, and disk variants with local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage will also be available in the coming months.