Up to 600 Gbps and Graviton4: EC2 C8gn Instances Arrive in Paris!

Hello everyone, it's Shii! I've got great news from AWS today: an EC2 instance built for serious network performance is now available in another region, so let's dive right in!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS's What's New, Amazon EC2 C8gn instances, powered by Graviton4 processors, are now available in the AWS Europe (Paris) region. C8gn is the latest generation of the network-optimized instance family, delivering up to 30% better compute performance than the previous-generation, Graviton3-based C7gn instances.

The headline feature is the network bandwidth: C8gn offers up to 600 Gbps, the highest network bandwidth among all network-optimized EC2 instances.

The story so far

Until now, if you wanted a network-optimized instance in the Paris region, the main option was the previous-generation, Graviton3-based C7gn. C7gn is still a solid choice for network-heavy work, but compared to the Graviton4-powered C8gn, it falls a step behind in compute headroom and networking capacity. For workloads that lean on both heavy compute and heavy networking, like network virtual appliances, data analytics, or CPU-based AI/ML inference, that meant your latest-generation options in the region were limited.

What changes

With C8gn now available in Paris, you can run these workloads locally with more performance and throughput. AWS notes that C8gn lets you scale performance and throughput for network-intensive workloads such as network virtual appliances, data analytics, and CPU-based AI/ML inference, while also optimizing cost.

Concretely, that's up to 30% better compute performance compared to C7gn, plus up to 600 Gbps of network bandwidth, so an instance of the same size can now handle a lot more traffic. If data residency requirements mean you need to stick to the Paris region, this is a genuinely useful upgrade.

Dive Deep

Let's look a bit closer at the specs.

C8gn is built on the latest 6th generation AWS Nitro Cards, which is a big part of what drives its networking performance. Here's how the instance sizing breaks down:

• Instance sizes go up to 48xlarge
• Up to 384 GiB of memory
• Up to 120 Gbps of bandwidth to Amazon EBS

Some sizes also support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking. The supported sizes are:

• 16xlarge
• 24xlarge
• 48xlarge
• metal-24xl
• metal-48xl

If you pick one of the EFA-enabled sizes, you get lower latency and better performance for tightly coupled cluster workloads. If you're running HPC-style workloads or distributed processing that needs tight coordination across nodes, these sizes are worth a look.

Wrap-up

Today I covered the news that Amazon EC2 C8gn instances, powered by Graviton4, are now available in the AWS Europe (Paris) region.

• Up to 30% better compute performance than the Graviton3-based C7gn
• Up to 600 Gbps of network bandwidth, the highest among network-optimized EC2 instances
• A solid spec sheet: up to 48xlarge, 384 GiB of memory, and up to 120 Gbps of EBS bandwidth
• EFA networking support on 16xlarge, 24xlarge, 48xlarge, metal-24xl, and metal-48xl

If you're running network-intensive, compute-heavy workloads like network virtual appliances, data analytics, or CPU-based AI/ML inference in the Paris region, this update should really hit the spot!