Amazon EC2 R8g Instances based on Graviton4: Best Value & Quality

AWS Graviton4

After being in preview since re:Invent 2023, the new AWS Graviton4-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R8g instances are now generally available to everyone. Having created over 2 million Graviton processors, AWS offers more than 150 distinct AWS Graviton-powered Amazon EC2 instance types globally at scale. Additionally, over 50,000 customers use AWS Graviton-based instances to get the greatest pricing performance for their applications.

Amazon EC2 R8g Instances

Amazon’s most powerful and energy-efficient processor, the AWS Graviton4, runs many Amazon EC2 applications. AWS Graviton4 employs 64-bit Arm instruction set architecture like other Graviton CPUs. Graviton4-based Amazon EC2 R8g instances outperform R7g instances by 30%. This speeds up your hardest workloads, such as real-time big data analytics, in-memory caches, and high-performance databases.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R8g instances with the latest AWS Graviton4 processors offer the best pricing performance for memory-optimized workloads. Databases, in-memory caches, and real-time big data analytics run well on Amazon EC2 R8g instances. Comparing R8g instances to the seventh-generation AWS Graviton3-based R7g instances, the former offer up to 30% greater performance and larger instance sizes with up to three times more vCPUs and memory.

Advantages

Amazon EC2’s best price-performance ratio for workloads with memory optimisation

Compared to R7g instances built on Graviton3, R8g instances perform up to 30% better. These instances are perfect for many applications, including databases, in-memory caches, and real-time big data analytics, and they come with DDR5-5600 memory.

Increased effectiveness of resources

Built on the AWS Nitro System are R8g instances. Fast local storage, private networking, and isolated multitenancy are all provided by the AWS Nitro System, which combines specialised hardware with a lightweight hypervisor.

Broad software support

The majority of widely used Linux operating systems are compatible with AWS Graviton-based instances. AWS Graviton-based instances are also supported by a large number of well-known security, monitoring and management, container, and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) apps and services from AWS and software partners. Utilising AWS Graviton-based instances, the AWS Graviton Ready programme provides approved software solutions from AWS Partner suppliers.

Qualities

Fueled by AWS Graviton4 chips

The most recent server processor generation from AWS, called AWS Graviton4, offers workloads in Amazon EC2 the highest performance and energy efficiency. Compared to Graviton3 processors, AWS Graviton4 processors offer compute performance that is up to 30% higher.

Increased safety

With separate caches for each virtual CPU and support for pointer authentication, AWS Graviton4 processors provide improved security. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) encryption is also supported by EC2 R8g instances.

Based on the AWS Nitro Framework

Many of the typical virtualization tasks are delegated to specialised hardware and software via the AWS Nitro System, a comprehensive collection of building components. It lowers the overhead associated with virtualization by providing high performance, high availability, and high security.

EC2 R8g instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton4 processors. They deliver the best price performance in Amazon EC2 for memory-intensive applications.

Amazon EC2 R8g

Product Details

Instance size	vCPU	Memory (GiB)	Instance storage (GB)	Network bandwidth (Gbps)	Amazon EBS bandwidth (Gbps)
r8g.medium	1	8	EBS-only	Up to 12.5	Up to 10
r8g.large	2	16	EBS-only	Up to 12.5	Up to 10
r8g.xlarge	4	32	EBS-only	Up to 12.5	Up to 10
r8g.2xlarge	8	64	EBS-only	Up to 15	Up to 10
r8g.4xlarge	16	128	EBS-only	Up to 15	Up to 10
r8g.8xlarge	32	256	EBS-only	15	10
r8g.12xlarge	48	384	EBS-only	22.5	15
r8g.16xlarge	64	512	EBS-only	30	20
r8g.24xlarge	96	768	EBS-only	40	30
r8g.48xlarge	192	1,536	EBS-only	50	40
r8g.metal-24xl	96	768	EBS-only	40	30
r8g.metal-48xl	192	1,536	EBS-only	50	40

EC2 R8g

More than 100 customers, including Epic Games, SmugMug, Honeycomb, SAP, and ClickHouse, have tested their workloads on AWS Graviton4-based EC2 R8g instances since the preview announcement at re:Invent 2023 and have seen a notable performance boost over comparable instances. When it came to their picture and data compression activities, SmugMug found that utilising AWS Graviton4-based instances outperformed AWS Graviton3-based instances by 20–40%. In comparison to the non-Graviton based instances they utilised four years ago, Epic Games discovered that AWS Graviton4 instances are the fastest EC2 instances they have ever tested, and Honeycomb.io obtained more than twice the throughput per vCPU.

Now let’s have a look at some of the enhancements we’ve included to our new instances. In comparison to R7g instances, EC2 R8g instances offer bigger instance sizes with up to 3x more vCPUs (up to 48xl), 3x more memory (up to 1.5TB), 75% more memory bandwidth, and 2x more L2 cache. This facilitates processing bigger data sets, increasing workloads, speeding up outcomes, and reducing total cost of ownership. In comparison to Graviton3-based instances, which have maximum network bandwidth of 30 Gbps and maximum EBS bandwidth of 20 Gbps, R8g instances offer up to 50 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 40 Gbps EBS bandwidth.

The first Graviton instances to offer two bare metal sizes (metal-24xl and metal-48xl) are R8g instances. You can deploy workloads that gain from direct access to real resources and appropriately scale your instances. The specifications for EC2 R8g instances are as follows:

EC2 R8g instances offer the best energy efficiency for memory-intensive workloads in EC2 if you’re searching for more energy-efficient computing options to help you meet your sustainability goals and lessen your carbon footprint. Furthermore, these instances are based on the AWS Nitro System, which improves workload speed and security by delegating networking, storage, and CPU virtualization tasks to specialised hardware and software. All high-speed physical hardware interfaces are securely encrypted by the Graviton4 processors, providing you with increased security.

EC2 R8g instances are best for Linux-based workloads like Docker, Kubernetes, and popular programming languages like C/C++, Rust, Go, Java, Python,.NET Core, Node.js, Ruby, and PHP. AWS Graviton4 processors execute web applications 30% faster, databases 40% faster, and large Java programmes 45% faster than AWS Graviton3 processors. Check out the AWS Graviton Technical Guide for additional information.

To begin moving your applications to Graviton instance types, have a look at the assortment of Graviton resources. To get started with Graviton adoption, you may also go to the AWS Graviton Fast Start programme.