Posted On: Dec 18, 2020

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C6gn instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors and featuring up to 100 Gbps network bandwidth are generally available. Amazon EC2 C6gn instances deliver up to 40% better price-performance over C5n instances for applications requiring high network bandwidth such as high performance computing (HPC), network appliances, data lakes and data analytics.

AWS Graviton2 processors are custom-built by AWS using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to enable the best price performance for workloads running in Amazon EC2. The compute optimized Amazon EC2 C6g instances were launched in June 2020. Compared to C6g instances, C6gn instances deliver up to 4x higher network bandwidth and up to 2x higher EBS bandwidth for improved networking performance.

C6gn instances support up to 100 Gbps networking bandwidth, 38 Gbps Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth, up to 40% higher packet processing performance, and up to 40% better price performance versus comparable current generation x86-based network optimized instances. These instances can utilize the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for workloads like HPC and video processing that can take advantage of lower network latency with Message Passing Interface (MPI) for at-scale clusters. C6gn 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. C6gn instances support Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud, enabling customers to take advantage of security, scalability and reliability offered by VPC. Customers can also take advantage of improved network performance to accelerate data transfer to and from S3, reduce the data ingestion wait time for applications and speed up delivery of results.

C6gn 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, and Debian), FreeBSD, the Amazon Corretto distribution of OpenJDK, 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). 

C6gn instances are available today in US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon) and Europe (Ireland) AWS Regions. They are available in 8 sizes, with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48, and 64 vCPUs, and are purchasable as part of Savings Plans, On-Demand, as Reserved instances, or as Spot instances.

Customers can try their workloads on AWS Graviton2 based t4g.micro instances free for up to 750 hours per month until March 31st 2021. To get started with AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 M6g, M6gd, T4g, C6g, C6gd, C6gn, 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, C6g page, or the Getting Started Github page.