AWS has made Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances generally available. Both are powered by AWS Graviton5 processors and target memory-intensive workloads. The company says R9g instances provide up to 25% higher compute performance per vCPU than R8g instances based on Graviton4, while consuming less power.
R9g is designed for databases, in-memory caches such as Valkey, Redis, and Memcached, and real-time big data analytics. It also supports Linux-based workloads, including containerized applications and microservices running on Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, or Amazon ECS, as well as applications written in C/C++, Rust, Go, Java, Python, .NET Core, Node.js, Ruby, and PHP.
What does Graviton5 offer?
AWS attributes the performance improvement to several hardware changes compared with Graviton4 processors, including DDR5 memory running at 8800 MT/s, compared with 5600 MT/s in the previous generation, and an L3 cache that is five times larger. The company also cites up to double the network and Amazon EBS bandwidth in the largest instance sizes, reaching 100 Gbps for networking and 72 Gbps for EBS in the 48xlarge size, along with up to three times higher packet-processing performance.
R9g and R9gd support the Instance Bandwidth Configuration feature, which allows bandwidth allocation between Amazon EBS and Amazon VPC networks to be adjusted in 25% increments. This enables resources to be tuned according to workload characteristics, particularly in databases and caching systems.
The difference between R9g and R9gd
R9gd provides the same compute and networking performance as R9g, but adds local NVMe SSD storage. This addition is suitable for open-source databases, distributed real-time analytics, large in-memory databases, and caching workloads that require fast, low-latency temporary space.
Both versions are available in 11 sizes, from medium to metal-48xl. R9g starts with an instance offering 8 GiB of memory and one vCPU, and reaches 192 vCPUs and 1536 GiB of memory in R9g.48xlarge. R9gd local storage ranges from 59 GB in r9gd.medium to 11.4 TB distributed across three drives in r9gd.48xlarge.
What changes for users in practice?
AWS says that most applications currently running on R8g do not require software changes when moving to the equivalent R9g size. Mult architecture container images built for Arm64 can also run without modifications, provided a supported operating system is used. The listed operating systems include Amazon Linux 2023, Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 22.04 or later, RHEL 8.4 or later, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3 or later, and Debian 12 or later.
The new instances run on the AWS Nitro System and include the Nitro Isolation Engine, which AWS introduced in C9g and M9g instances earlier in the year. According to the company, the engine uses formal verification to provide mathematical guarantees for instance isolation by controlling access to virtual machine memory, processor register state, and I/O devices.
Availability and current limitations
At launch, R9g and R9gd are available in the US East regions of Northern Virginia and Ohio, the US West region of Oregon, and the Europe region of Frankfurt. They can be purchased through Savings Plans, On-Demand, and Spot Instances, as well as Dedicated Instances and Dedicated Hosts. The announcement did not provide specific prices, so organizations will need to consult the EC2 pricing page to compare the actual cost with R8g sizes or other processor options.