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EC2's New R9g and R9gd Bring Graviton5 to Memory-Optimized Instances!

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

Hi, I'm Shii-chan! There's a big memory-focused update from AWS today, and I'm excited to walk you through it!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS's What's New, two new EC2 memory-optimized instance families, R9g and R9gd, are now generally available. Both are powered by AWS Graviton5, AWS's fifth generation of custom-designed CPUs, built to deliver the best price performance for memory-intensive workloads.

  • R9g: great for databases, in-memory caches, real-time big data analytics, and Linux-based container/microservice workloads such as Kubernetes, Docker, EKS, and ECS
  • R9gd: everything R9g offers, plus local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage, making it a great fit for large in-memory databases, open-source databases, and large caching workloads

They support a wide range of languages too, including C/C++, Rust, Go, Java, Python, .NET Core, Node.js, Ruby, and PHP, so you should be able to bring your existing workloads over without much friction.

Why it matters

Memory-optimized instances often sit at the core of database and caching layers, so a generational shift here can affect a lot of production systems. The performance gains in this Graviton5 generation are notably large, which makes this launch worth paying attention to.

What changes

Compared to the Graviton4-based R8g and R8gd instances, R9g and R9gd offer these improvements:

  • Up to 25% better compute performance
  • Up to 30% faster for databases
  • Up to 35% faster for web applications
  • Up to 35% faster for machine learning workloads
  • 5x larger cache
  • The fastest memory of any processor instances in the cloud

For teams running databases, caches, or ML inference/preprocessing workloads, migrating to the same instance shape on R9g/R9gd could bring a noticeable speedup without changing your architecture.

Dive Deep

R9g and R9gd are built on the sixth generation of the AWS Nitro System, and they're the first instances to feature the new Nitro Isolation Engine. It uses formal verification to provide mathematical assurance that customer workloads are isolated from each other and from AWS operators, setting what AWS calls a new standard for mathematically proven cloud security.

These instances are available in three regions:

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

You can purchase them through Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, or Dedicated Hosts. The original announcement doesn't list specific instance sizes or pricing details, so check the EC2 R9g page on AWS if you want the full specs.

Wrap-up

  • Graviton5-powered memory-optimized instances R9g and R9gd are now generally available
  • Up to 25% better compute, up to 30% faster databases, up to 35% faster web apps and machine learning, and 5x larger cache compared to R8g/R8gd
  • Built on the sixth-generation Nitro System with the new Nitro Isolation Engine for formally verified isolation
  • Available in US East, US West, and EU (Frankfurt) regions

If you're running databases, in-memory caches, or large-scale machine learning pipelines, this is an update worth trying out.

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