AWS Opens Graviton5 EC2 R9g Instances For Memory-Heavy Workloads
AWS made EC2 R9g and R9gd instances generally available with Graviton5 processors, targeting memory-intensive workloads with faster DDR5 memory, larger cache and higher network and EBS bandwidth.
Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances are now generally available for memory-heavy cloud workloads, AWS announced in a News Blog post, moving its Graviton5 processor from platform roadmap into purchasable compute capacity.
The new families target databases, in-memory caches, real-time big data analytics, Linux workloads, containers and microservice applications.
R9gd adds local NVMe-based SSD block storage for workloads that need low-latency local storage alongside high memory capacity.
Graviton5 is the hardware change inside the launch.
AWS lists up to 25% higher compute performance per vCPU than Graviton4-based R8g instances, DDR5 8800 MT/s memory instead of 5600 MT/s, a five-times larger L3 cache, up to twice the network and Amazon EBS bandwidth on the largest sizes, and up to three-times higher packet-processing performance.
Bandwidth can also be shifted between storage and networking.
Instance Bandwidth Configuration lets operators adjust allocation between Amazon EBS and Amazon VPC networking by 25%, a control intended for databases and caching workloads whose bottleneck may sit in different parts of the I/O path.
The Nitro System remains the virtualization layer for both R9g and R9gd.
The instances include Nitro Isolation Engine, a formally verified isolation component introduced earlier with C9g and M9g, so the performance update arrives with the same security-isolation framing AWS has attached to its newer Graviton instance families.
The specification range runs across 11 sizes for each family, from medium to metal-48xl.
The largest R9g and R9gd configurations list 192 vCPUs, 100 Gbps network bandwidth and 72 Gbps EBS bandwidth; the R9gd 48xlarge and metal-48xl variants add three 3800 GB local NVMe SSDs.
Migration is positioned as a like-for-like instance move for most current R8g users rather than an application rewrite.
R9g supports major Arm-based Linux distributions, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS and standard Kubernetes deployments, while multi-architecture Arm64 container images can run without changes.
Availability starts in US East in Northern Virginia and Ohio, US West in Oregon, and Europe in Frankfurt.
The instances can be bought through Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances or Dedicated Hosts, leaving regional expansion and workload-specific pricing to the standard EC2 purchasing paths.
