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Amazon ECS Express Mode now supports Graviton for up to 40% better price-performance!

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

Hi, I'm Shii-chan!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

Today I have a nice update from AWS to share. Amazon ECS Express Mode, the service that lets you spin up containerized apps in a snap, now supports the ARM64 architecture!

What was announced?

According to AWS What's New, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Express Mode now lets you specify ARM64 as the CPU architecture for your service. This makes it easy to deploy ARM-based container images on AWS Graviton-powered compute, and you can benefit from up to 40% better price-performance compared to x86-based instances.

As a refresher, ECS Express Mode is designed to rapidly launch containerized applications, including web applications and APIs. You just provide your container image, and ECS Express Mode handles the rest: configuring networking, load balancing, auto scaling, and deployments, plus giving your application an auto-generated URL.

The story so far

Before this update, ECS Express Mode had a narrower set of architecture choices, which meant that if you wanted to use Graviton, you couldn't always get the simplicity of Express Mode along with it. With this update, Express Mode keeps its ease of use while widening your architecture options.

What changes

You can now configure the CPU architecture for both new and existing ECS Express Mode services. That means you can choose based on what matters to you:

  • Optimizing for cost with Graviton
  • Matching your existing fleet (ARM-based)
  • Deploying images that were natively built for ARM

Being able to pick the architecture that fits your workload is a genuinely nice option to have.

Dive Deep

You can configure the CPU architecture using any of these:

  • AWS Management Console
  • AWS CLI
  • AWS SDKs
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools

This capability is available in all AWS commercial Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. For more details, AWS points you to the ECS Express Mode documentation.

Wrap-up

  • Amazon ECS Express Mode now supports the ARM64 (AWS Graviton) architecture
  • Up to 40% better price-performance compared to x86-based instances
  • Configurable for both new and existing services
  • Set it up via Console, CLI, SDKs, or IaC tools
  • Available in all commercial Regions and GovCloud (US)

If you're looking to cut costs or you already have ARM-native images ready to go, this update is definitely worth checking out. If you're using ECS Express Mode, go take a look!

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