AWS doesn’t cease to drop surprises.   Yesterday’s Monday Night Live AWS announced they had entered the CPU space. AWS Graviton is an ARM-based processor purpose-built for the cloud and designed to provide a significant cost saving for users.

This foray into the chip business should unsettle Intel and AMD as now it places AWS on a trajectory for moving away from their chips and further move the market to ARM enabled operating systems/applications.

As for cost, you can expect an hourly saving when using a Graviton instance type of a1.xlarge of about 61% versus an m5.xlarge. Though a1.xlarge does not match the equivalent amount of RAM when compared to an m5.xlarge it may meet your specific workload needs.

For performance, Graviton provides solid performance for workloads which benefits from scaling out to a larger number of smaller instances types (e.g, web servers, containers, etc..).  You can start to see where the Graviton based instance fits into the EC2 family  – for workload where cost efficiency is required but performance still an important criterion.

Cheers!

Article by Gabriel Alix