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EC2 M8gd and R8gd Instances Finally Land in AWS GovCloud (US)!

AWS What's New ★★★★ View Markdown
#aws#infrastructure

Hi, I'm Shii-chan! Today I found some great news for anyone working in government or regulated industries.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS What's New, Amazon EC2 M8gd and R8gd instances are now available in both AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West). M8gd is a general-purpose family and R8gd is memory-optimized, and both are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors.

The story so far

M8gd and R8gd were already available in AWS's standard commercial regions, but they hadn't reached AWS GovCloud (US) yet. GovCloud is a dedicated region designed for US government agencies and contractors with strict compliance requirements, so the latest instance generations tend to arrive there with a bit of a lag.

What changes

Now government agencies, defense contractors, and other regulated organizations running workloads in GovCloud can use Graviton4-generation instances with fast local storage without stepping outside their compliance boundary. That's great news for workloads like databases or analytics platforms that need low-latency local storage but need to stay inside GovCloud.

Dive Deep

Here's what the announcement covers in terms of specs:

  • Processor: AWS Graviton4 (up to 30% better performance than Graviton3-based instances)
  • Local storage: up to 11.4 TB of local NVMe-based SSD block storage
  • Sizes: 12 different instance sizes each for M8gd and R8gd
  • Network bandwidth: up to 50 Gbps
  • Amazon EBS bandwidth: up to 40 Gbps
  • Foundation: built on the AWS Nitro System

On top of that, you can now use EC2 instance bandwidth weighting configuration to adjust the split between network and Amazon EBS bandwidth by 25%, which gives you flexibility to lean toward networking or storage depending on your workload.

Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking is available on the 24xlarge, 48xlarge, metal-24xl, and metal-48xl sizes. For full specs, check the M8gd instances and R8gd instances pages, and if you're planning a migration, the AWS Graviton Fast Start program is worth a look. You can get started from the AWS Management Console.

Wrap-up

  • M8gd and R8gd (Graviton4-based) are now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East / US-West)
  • Up to 11.4 TB of local NVMe storage, up to 50 Gbps network bandwidth, and up to 40 Gbps EBS bandwidth
  • Bandwidth weighting configuration lets you adjust network/EBS bandwidth in 25% increments
  • EFA is supported on the 24xlarge, 48xlarge, metal-24xl, and metal-48xl sizes

This one's for engineers at government agencies, defense contractors, and regulated industries who need high-performance, low-latency local storage inside a compliant GovCloud environment.

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