Amazon EC2 A1 Instances

Optimized cost and performance for scale-out workloads

Amazon EC2 A1 instances deliver significant cost savings for scale-out and Arm-based applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, caching fleets, and distributed data stores 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. These instances will also appeal to developers, enthusiasts, and educators across the Arm developer community. Most architecture-agnostic applications that can run on Arm cores could also benefit from A1 instances.

If you are an Open Source developer or community building for the Arm architecture, then access to Amazon EC2 A1 instances can help eliminate complexities associated with cross-compilation/emulation, and improve time to market. Individual developers can apply for $50 in AWS promotional credits here. Open Source communities that have ongoing infrastructure requirements can learn more here.

Explore the A1 Solution Brief

Benefits

Flexibility and Choice

A1 instances add to the broadest and deepest selection of EC2 instances. Developers can now access instances with the Arm instruction set and experience the flexibility, security, reliability, and scalability of running on EC2. Familiar AWS and Amazon EC2 capabilities, such as EBS, Networking, and AMIs work seamlessly with A1 instances.

Lower Cost

A1 instances deliver significant cost saving for workloads that are supported by the extensive Arm ecosystem. These include general purpose workloads such as web servers, containerized microservices, caching fleets, and distributed data stores that that can be spread across multiple cores and can fit within the available A1 instance memory footprint.

Maximized Resource Efficiency

A1 instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances for better overall performance and security.

Key Features

Powered by AWS Graviton Processors

AWS Graviton Processors feature 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS delivering optimized performance and cost. AWS Graviton Processors are built exclusively for the cloud, utilizing AWS and Annapurna Labs' expertise in running hyperscale cloud platforms and cloud applications.

High Performance Networking and Storage

Next generation Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and NVM Express (NVMe) technology provide A1 instances with high throughput, low latency bandwidth interfaces for networking and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).

Built on AWS Nitro System

The AWS Nitro System is a rich collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware and software to deliver high performance, high availability, and high security while also reducing virtualization overhead.

Product Details

Model	vCPUs	Memory (GiB)	Instance Storage	Network Bandwidth (Gbps)	EBS Bandwidth (Mbps)
a1.medium	1	2	EBS-Only	Up to 10	Up to 3,500
a1.large	2	4	EBS-Only	Up to 10	Up to 3,500
a1.xlarge	4	8	EBS-Only	Up to 10	Up to 3,500
a1.2xlarge	8	16	EBS-Only	Up to 10	Up to 3,500
a1.4xlarge	16	32	EBS-Only	Up to 10	3,500
a1.metal	16*	32	EBS-Only	Up to 10	3,500

* a1.metal provides 16 physical cores

Customer Success Stories

NetEase is a leading internet technology company based in China that’s dedicated to providing premium online services centered on content, community, communication and commerce. We develop and operate some of the most popular PC-client and mobile games in China, and we have recently expanded our gaming platform into international markets. We recently switched to Amazon EC2 A1 instances with the goal of lowering our operational costs. We use Amazon EC2 A1 instances to run the audio voice service, which powers real-time player chat, and the network forwarding service, which is built to accelerate gaming traffic. “The audio voice and network forwarding services are network I/O bound and the A1 instances provide up to 10Gbps of network bandwidth. These services are written in Python which makes them platform independent and enabled a quick and easy transition to Amazon EC2 A1 instances”, says Bruce Sun, Senior Cloud Solutions Architect at NetEase Games. Bruce attributes a 40% Amazon EC2 cloud infrastructure cost saving for these services after adopting Amazon EC2 A1 instances.

"VMware is exploring running our leading virtualization platform in different Arm environments, at the Edge, on the SmartNIC, and in the Cloud. Amazon's EC2 A1 instance helps accelerate our Arm development process by providing a readily available and scalable compute instance to prototype, validate and test new use cases. The A1 metal instance also enables us to evaluate new deployment scenarios and integration with our stack which we believe will deliver meaningful innovation to our customers."

- Will Pien Product Management ESXi

SmugMug is a service that allows users to upload, store, and share photos and videos. They achieved a 40% cost savings by migrating their photo-serving tier to EC2 A1 instances. SmugMug was able to move their software stack (PHP, Nginx, HAProxy) to A1 instances with minimal effort. And getting everything up and running on A1 instances was like any other EC2 instance for SmugMug.

Geodata processes logs of server activity for both near-real-time and long-term purposes. The processing is performed using custom software written in Python with various open-source libraries, and runs on EC2 along with other AWS technologies such as Lambda and CloudWatch Logs. Geodata found the migration of the EC2 components to EC2 A1 instances to be effortless, and the A1 instances to be optimal.

Read the full case study »

Reamp, a provider of consulting and media solutions, collects and processes data through multiple 3rd party APIs to deliver meaningful marketing insights for their customers. They seamlessly transitioned their in-house Java application using the same Ubuntu + OpenJDK software environment and found the A1 instances to deliver optimal cost and performance for their data processing workloads. Based on this positive experience with A1 instances they are currently exploring additional workloads for migration. Learn more »

Docker is the leader in the containerization market, combining an enterprise-grade container platform with world-class services. The pervasiveness of Arm-powered technologies across the global internet infrastructure market is unmatched, and now nearly two million Docker developers can build and scale applications for the cloud and connected devices quickly and securely. Docker Enterprise Engine for Amazon EC2 A1 instances backed by commercial support from Docker enables the Arm ecosystem with a modern, enterprise grade container platform for high-velocity innovation.

When we introduced k3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution built for the edge, we needed to run our CI infrastructure on ARM servers. Amazon EC2 A1 instances made a huge difference in our development and test process, and ensured we could efficiently develop, build and release k3s entirely on ARM without the need for cross-compiling and emulation.

Read the full case study »

Diginteligencia is a Mexican information technology services company providing web applications, mobile telephony and connection platforms for medium and large communication and entertainment companies. We provide a prepaid cellphone billing service to several mobile operators in Latin America. Once a customer runs out of cellphone credit their internet traffic is redirected and filtered to ensure reliable access to purchase additional credit. We explored multiple solutions before settling on Amazon EC2 A1 instances running Nginx, .NET core and Docker, which is currently saving us approximately $6K per month.

OpenSymbol is the only Italian CRM Company that has been implementing CRM solutions for 15 years. As a technology company we’re always looking for ways to optimize cost, and as an Amazon Web Services customer we have access to a broad and deep portfolio of cloud services to choose from. We recently migrated a portion of our PHP and Java based production web application to Amazon EC2 A1 instances and we’re observing the same performance while realizing significant cost benefits.

Bayt.com is the leading job site in the Middle East and North Africa, connecting job seekers with employers looking to hire. Every day, thousands of new job vacancies are listed on the award-winning platform from the region's top employers. Access to the latest technologies at a competitive price helps us to better serve our customer’s needs. The Amazon EC2 A1 instances powered by AWS Graviton processor enables us to host our LAMP stack and chat application while significantly reducing costs.

Iron.io provides DevOps tools for developers to work smarter, not harder. Our Cloud and on premise products help businesses scale efficiently and intelligently. Since releasing our flagship Worker background job processor in early 2011, Iron.io customers have enjoyed hosted solutions tightly coupled with Amazon Web Services (AWS). With the launch of Amazon EC2 A1 instances powered by AWS Graviton Processors, an increasing number of customers have requested Arm architecture support. We’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of IronWorker for Arm-based on premise and AWS cloud deployments.

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