Amazon EKS support for Arm-based instances powered by AWS Graviton is now generally available

Posted on: Aug 17, 2020

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) customers can now run production workloads using Arm-based instances including the recently launched Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors.  

AWS Graviton processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2. The new general purpose (M6g), compute-optimized (C6g), and memory-optimized (R6g) instances deliver up to 40% better price/performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances 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.  

Arm-based instances were previously available on EKS as part of a public preview. With general availability, you can mix x86 and Arm based EC2 instances within a cluster, and easily evaluate Arm-based application in existing environments. 

EC2 Arm-based instances are supported on new and existing clusters running Kubernetes version 1.15 and above, and can be deployed using EKS managed node groups, eksctl, CloudFormation, or the AWS CLI. To get started, visit the Amazon EKS documentation. To learn more about Arm-based instances and AWS Graviton, check out the Amazon EC2 documentation.