New – EC2 Instances (A1) Powered by Arm-Based AWS Graviton Processors
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Earlier this year I told you about the AWS Nitro System and promised you that it would allow us to “deliver new instance types more quickly than ever in the months to come.” Since I made that promise we have launched memory-intensive
We acquired Annapurna Labs in 2015 after working with them on the first version of the AWS Nitro System. Since then we’ve worked with them to build and release two generations of ASICs (chips, not shoes) that now offload all EC2 system functions to Nitro, allowing 100% of the hardware to be devoted to customer instances. A few years ago the team started to think about building an Amazon-built custom CPU designed for cost-sensitive scale-out workloads.
AWS Graviton Processors
Today we are launching EC2 instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton Processors. Built around Arm cores and making extensive use of custom-built silicon, the A1 instances are optimized for performance and cost. They are a great fit for scale-out workloads where you can share the load across a group of smaller instances. This includes containerized microservices, web servers, development environments, and caching fleets.
The A1 instances are available in five sizes, all EBS-Optimized by default, at a significantly lower cost:
| Instance Name | vCPUs |
RAM |
EBS Bandwidth | Network Bandwidth | On-Demand Price/Hour US East (N. Virginia) |
| a1.medium | 1 | 2 GiB | Up to 3.5 Gbps | Up to 10 Gbps | $0.0255 |
| a1.large | 2 | 4 GiB | Up to 3.5 Gbps | Up to 10 Gbps | $0.0510 |
| a1.xlarge | 4 | 8 GiB | Up to 3.5 Gbps | Up to 10 Gbps | $0.1020 |
| a1.2xlarge | 8 | 16 GiB | Up to 3.5 Gbps | Up to 10 Gbps | $0.2040 |
| a1.4xlarge | 16 | 32 GiB | 3.5 Gbps | Up to 10 Gbps | $0.4080 |
If your application is written in a scripting language, odds are that you can simply move it over to an A1 instance and run it as-is. If your application compiles down to native code, you will need to rebuild it on an A1 instance.
I was lucky enough to get early access to some A1 instances in order to put them through their paces. The console was still under construction so I launched my first instance from the command line:
$ aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-036237e941dccd50e \
--instance-type a1.medium --count 1 --key-name keys-jbarr-us-eastThe instance is up and running in seconds; I can run uname to check the architecture:
AMIs are available for Amazon Linux 2, RHEL, and Ubuntu today, with additional operating system support on the way.
Available Now
The A1 instances are available now in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) Regions in On-Demand, Reserved Instance, Spot, Dedicated Instance, and Dedicated Host form and you can launch them today.
— Jeff;