Posted On: Jul 27, 2020

Starting today, new general purpose Amazon EC2 M6gd, compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C6gd, and memory-optimized Amazon EC2 R6gd instances with local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage are now available. These instances are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors and deliver up to 40% better price performance and 50% more NVMe storage GB/vCPU over comparable x86-based instances for a wide variety of workloads, including application servers, micro-services, high-performance computing, CPU-based machine learning inference, electronic design automation, gaming, open-source databases, and in-memory caches. The local SSD storage provided on these instances is ideal for applications that need access to high-speed, low latency storage, as well as for temporary storage of data such as batch and log processing, and for high-speed caches and scratch files.

AWS Graviton2 processors are custom-built by AWS using 64-bit Arm Neoverse N1 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 M6gd, C6gd and R6gd 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 provide up to 3.8 TB of NVMe-based SSD storage and up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth. In addition to the newly available M6gd, C6gd and R6gd instances, the Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances based on AWS Graviton2 processors are already available. All AWS Graviton2-based instances support up to 19 Gbps Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth. Many customers have successfully adopted AWS Graviton2 based instances with minimal effort and are realizing their price performance benefits.  

The AWS Graviton2 based 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, CentOS, and Debian), FreeBSD/NetBSD, 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, Dynatrace, Honeycomb.io, Qualys, Rapid7, and Tenable), and developer/automation tools (AWS Code Suite, Chef, GitLab, Jenkins, and TravisCI).  

The M6gd, C6gd and R6gd instances are now available in the AWS US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) regions. They are available in 8 sizes, with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48, and 64 vCPUs in addition to the bare metal option, and are purchasable On-Demand, as Reserved instances, as Spot instances, or as part of Savings Plans.  

To get started with AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 M6g, M6gd, C6g, C6gd, R6g, and R6gd instances, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit the AWS Graviton page, M6g page, C6g page, R6g page, or the Getting Started Github page.