Announcing new Amazon EC2 X2gd instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors

Posted on: Mar 16, 2021
Starting today, the next generation of memory optimized Amazon EC2 X2gd instances are available. These instances are built on the AWS Nitro System and are powered by AWS-designed, Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors. They deliver up to 55% better price performance compared to current generation x86-based X1 instances and provide high memory per vCPU at the lowest cost per GiB of memory in Amazon EC2. The higher performance and additional memory of X2gd instances enable customers to run memory-intensive workloads such as in-memory databases (Redis, Memcached), relational databases (MySQL, PostGreSQL), electronic design automation (EDA) workloads, real-time analytics, and real-time caching servers. Customers running containerized workloads can also use X2gd instances to optimize their infrastructure by consolidating more containers on a single instance. X2gd instances also feature local NVMe-based SSD storage for applications that need high speed, low latency access to data.
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.
The AWS Nitro System is 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.

The X2gd 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/NetBSD, the Amazon Corretto distribution of OpenJDK, container services (Amazon ECR, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Docker, and Rancher), agents/scanners (Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Systems Manager, Amazon Inspector, Aquasec, Crowdstrike, Datadog, Dynatrace, Honeycomb.io, Lacework, New Relic, Qualys, Rapid7, Snyk, Splunk, Tenable, and Trend Micro), and developer/automation tools (AWS CloudFormation, AWS Code Suite, Chef, CircleCI, GitLab, Jenkins, Terraform, and TravisCI)..

The X2gd instances are now available in the AWS US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) regions. They are available in 9 sizes, including a bare metal instance, providing up to 64 vCPUs, 1TB NVMe-based SSD storage, 25 Gbps of networking bandwidth, and 19 Gbps of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) bandwidth. The X2gd instances 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 X2gd instances, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. Customers looking to get started with AWS Graviton2 processors can also use the T4g free trial with up to 750 hours per month for t4g.micro instances until June 30th 2020. To learn more, visit the Amazon EC2 X2gd page or the AWS Graviton page.