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Packet processing up to 3x faster! Graviton5-powered R9g and R9gd instances have arrived

AWS Blog ★★★★ View Markdown
#aws#infrastructure

Hey, I'm Shii-chan! I found some exciting news about new EC2 instances, so let me share it with you!

AWS Blog aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

AWS's Blog announced that Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances, powered by AWS Graviton5 processors, are now generally available. They're the latest generation in the memory-optimized instance family, well suited for databases, in-memory caches, and real-time big data analytics.

The story so far

The previous generation was the R8g instance, powered by Graviton4. Compared to R8g, R9g and R9gd bring several hardware-level improvements.

  • Compute performance: up to 25% better per vCPU
  • Memory speed: DDR5 at 8800 MT/s (up from 5600 MT/s)
  • L3 cache capacity: 5x larger
  • Network and EBS bandwidth: up to 2x higher (up to 100 Gbps network, 72 Gbps EBS)
  • Packet processing performance: up to 3x higher

What changes

With the boosted memory bandwidth and cache, workloads that move a lot of data through memory stand to benefit the most — think in-memory caches, databases, real-time big data analytics, and containerized applications running on Kubernetes or Docker. The network and packet-processing improvements also help reduce latency for network-heavy applications.

If you're already using an Arm-compatible AMI on R8g, you can typically move to R9g or R9gd without changing your code.

Dive Deep

Here's how the lineup and the two instance types differ.

  • R9g (EBS-only): 11 sizes from medium to metal-48xl. 1 to 192 vCPUs, 8 GiB to 1536 GiB of memory
  • R9gd (with local NVMe SSD): same compute and network performance as R9g, plus 59 GB to 3.8 TB of local storage depending on size

At launch, the instances are available in three Regions.

  • US East (N. Virginia, Ohio)
  • US West (Oregon)
  • Europe (Frankfurt)

They support On-Demand, Savings Plans, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, and Dedicated Hosts purchasing options. You can check detailed pricing on the EC2 pricing page.

To get started, check the AWS Graviton Getting Started Guide and launch an instance from an Arm-compatible AMI.

Wrap-up

  • R9g and R9gd instances powered by AWS Graviton5 are now generally available
  • Up to 25% better compute performance per vCPU and up to 3x packet processing versus R8g
  • R9g is EBS-only; R9gd adds 59 GB to 3.8 TB of local NVMe SSD storage
  • Currently available in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt)
  • Migrating from R8g typically requires no code changes

This is especially worth checking out if you're running databases, caches, or real-time analytics platforms that depend on memory bandwidth and network performance.

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