Yesterday AWS announced Lambda Functions powered by AWS Graviton2 processors. A service that supports these new ARM processors. In this blogpost I will talk about the advantages of this new processor architecture.

What is AWS Graviton?

AWS Graviton is a series of server processors that AWS released in 2018 based on ARM architecture for customers of its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual machine instances. The first generation AWS Graviton processors featured custom silicon and 64-bit Neoverse cores.
Graviton versus Graviton2: What are the differences?
At launch, AWS promised Graviton2 offered 40% better price-performance than comparable X86 processors and 7x better than first-generation AWS Graviton processors. The new-generation processors should also offer 4x compute cores, memory that’s 5x faster, and 2x as large caches compared to Graviton1 processors.

With Graviton2, AWS also made some key improvements to empower developers to create cloud-native apps that can run securely and at scale. That includes the always-on 256-bit DRAM encryption.

What are your benefits?

1. Cost-effective
   ARM processor family means they are likely to be a system on a chip. This further translates to lower power consumption costs while offering satisfying performance to most customers.

2. Built for general purpose
   AWS Graviton cores are also built to improve efficiency in servers, mid-size data storing processes, micro-services and cluster computing.

3. Effective CPU power
   AWS Graviton processors also offer up to 3.45% higher performance over traditional architecture. They also provide more straightforward processor implementations than X86 processors.

Which service is supporting Graviton2?

Lambda

Lambda functions powered by Graviton2 are designed to deliver up to 19% better performance at 20% lower cost. AWS asserted that "Workloads using multithreading and multiprocessing, or performing many I/O operations, can experience lower execution time and, as a consequence, even lower costs."

Region Availability:

• US East (N. Virginia)
• US East (Ohio)
• US West (Oregon)
• Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
• Asia Pacific (Singapore)
• Asia Pacific (Sydney)
• Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
• Europe (Frankfurt)
• Europe (Ireland)
• Europe (London)

The following runtimes running on top of Amazon Linux 2 are supported on ARM:

• Node.js 12 and 14
• Python 3.8 and 3.9
• Java 8 (java8.al2) and 11
• .NET Core 3.1
• Ruby 2.7
• Custom Runtime (provided.al2) Price advantage: 20% better price performance.

RDS

Graviton2 is supported on RDS MySQL 8.0.17 (or higher) and RDS PostgreSQL 12.3 (and higher). With this regional expansion, Amazon RDS M6g and R6g instance.

Region Availability:

• US East (N. Virginia)
• US East (Ohio)
• US West (Oregon)
• Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
• Asia Pacific (Singapore)
• Asia Pacific (Sydney)
• Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
• Europe (Ireland)
• Europe (Frankfurt) Price advantage: 52% price improvement for RDS open-source databases depending on the database engine.

EC2 and EKS

Graviton2 instances are supported by several open-source software distributions and services.

Here is the list of support for Graviton2 instances:

• EC2
• Amazon Linux 2 Ubuntu
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 and 8.0
• SUSE
• Fedora
• Debian
• FreeBSD
• NetBSD

• Amazon Corretto distribution of OpenJDK
  Region Availability:

• US East (N. Virginia, Ohio)

• US West (Northern California, Oregon)

• Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo)

• Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt)
  Price advantage: 40% better price performance over comparable x86-based instances

CodeBuild

CodeBuild customers targeting ARM benefit from the enhanced capabilities of AWS Graviton2 processors. The upgrade delivers a major leap in performance and capabilities over first-generation AWS Graviton processors. They deliver 7x more performance, 4x more compute cores, 5x faster memory and 2x larger caches.

Region Availability:

• US East (N. Virginia)
• US East (Ohio)
• US West (Oregon)
• Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
• Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
• Asia Pacific (Sydney)
• Europe (Frankfurt)
• Europe (Ireland)