Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors are now generally available. The family is designed for memory-intensive workloads and containerized Linux-based applications, including databases, in-memory caches, real-time big data analytics, and microservices.
R9g is memory-optimized and delivers up to 25% higher compute performance per vCPU compared with Graviton4-based R8g instances, reflecting AWS’s latest energy-efficient Graviton5 design. R9gd adds local NVMe-based SSD storage for fast, low-latency scratch space and large caches.
PERFORMANCE AND MEMORY IMPROVEMENTS
Graviton5-based R9g instances introduce several hardware enhancements over Graviton4: TechStaged has also covered GitHub makes pinning saved views to the repository issues sidebar generally available.
- Up to 25% higher compute performance per vCPU
- DDR5 8800 MT/s memory (up from 5600 MT/s in Graviton4)
- 5x larger L3 cache for better data locality
- Up to 2x higher network and EBS bandwidth for the largest instances (up to 100 Gbps network, up to 72 Gbps EBS on the 48xlarge)
- Up to 3x higher packet-processing performance
NETWORKING, BANDWIDTH AND STORAGE SPECIFICS
R9gd instances offer the same compute and networking performance as R9g, with the added benefit of local NVMe-based SSD storage for fast scratch space or temporary caches.
The R9g/R9gd family supports Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC), a feature that lets operators adjust the allocation of bandwidth between Amazon EBS and VPC networking by up to 25% to optimize workloads with specific bandwidth requirements such as databases and caching.
PLATFORM, SECURITY AND ARCHITECTURE
All R9g and R9gd instances run on the AWS Nitro System, which offloads virtualization, storage, and networking to dedicated hardware for near-bare-metal performance and strong isolation.
The Nitro Isolation Engine (NIE) is part of the Nitro System and uses formal verification to provide mathematically proven isolation between virtual machines and their I/O, memory and CPU state.
AVAILABILITY, REGIONS AND PRICING
R9g and R9gd instances are available in multiple regions, including US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt). They can be purchased through Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, or Dedicated Hosts.
GETTING STARTED AND MIGRATION
Users can launch R9g and R9gd instances from the EC2 console using Arm-based AMIs. R9g supports major Linux distributions, and migration from R8g generally requires no code changes for most applications. Containerized workloads work with Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and standard Kubernetes deployments. Multi-arch Arm64 container images run without changes. AWS provides resources to help migrations, including the Graviton Getting Started Guide and the Graviton Savings Dashboard.
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