Recently Amazon announced the general availability of their 6th generation Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) General Purpose instance: the M6g – with the ‘g’ standing for "Graviton2", a next-generation Arm-based chip. The public cloud vendor and their acquired company Annapurna Labs designed this chip, which utilizes 64-bit Arm Neoverse N1 cores.
Amazon first announced the Graviton2 instances during re:Invent in December 2019, claiming that the processor offers seven times the performance of the previous Arm-based instance (A1) and provides a significant improvement over the Intel-based, general-purpose EC2 instances. Furthermore, the processor is more secure by design, with memory protected by 256-bit encryption, and instances are enabled by Amazon’s Nitro virtualization layer that abstracts away the underlying hardware.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-m6g-ec2-instances-powered-by-arm-based-aws-graviton2/
Currently, the M6g instances are available in eight sizes with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48, and 64 vCPUs, or as bare metal instances. They are purchasable as On-Demand, Reserved instances, Spot instances, or as part of Savings Plans. Any of the instance configurations support up to 256 GiB of memory, 25 Gbps of network performance, and 19 Gbps of EBS bandwidth.
Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, stated in a tweet:
Excited to give customers our new Arm-based #AWS EC2 M6g instances that leverage our Graviton2 processors and deliver up to 40% better price-performance than the latest x86 instances. Big deal for customers.
With the availability of M6g instances, customers will have more choices in picking the EC2 instance for their workloads. Sébastien Stormacq, a technical evangelist at AWS, states in his blog post on M6g instance:
M6g instances are well-suited for workloads such as application servers, gaming servers, mid-size databases, caching fleets, web tier and the likes.
Also, Teri Radichel, CEO at 2nd Sight Lab, said in a tweet:
These are super interesting. I’ve been analyzing the different instance types lately to find the right instance types for my #pentesting workloads. Choosing the correct type improves performance and decreases cost.
The EC2 General Purpose M6g instances are currently available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS Regions - and pricing details of these and other instances are available on the pricing page. Furthermore, Amazon will bring more instances soon, with compute-optimized C6g instances and memory-optimized R6g instances.
