Day 3 - Graviton

AWS Cost Optimisation Advent Calendar 2024

2 min read time

#aws #rds #ec2

Welcome to day 3 of the unofficial AWS Cost Optimisation Advent Calendar 2024, where every day we will be sharing new tips or tricks to help you optimise your cloud costs before Christmas 2024.

Today we are talking about Graviton instances.

Graviton instances are powered by AWS-designed Arm-based processors, which are custom-built by AWS to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2.

As Amazon have cut out the middleman, they can offer these instances at a lower price than their Intel and AMD counterparts.

In many cases, simply switching your instances to the equivalent Graviton instance can result in a 20-40% cost saving on both RDS and EC2.

Finding Graviton Instances

To spot the graviton instances, they follow the naming convention ending in `g’ such as M6g, C6g, R6g, T4g.

To compare the price and performance of your existing instances vs the graviton instances you can visit https://instances.vantage.sh.

Migrating to Graviton

For RDS instances, in general it is a straight one-for-one swap and can be done during a maintenance window. However there are a few key considerations at the link below which we recommend you read before making the switch.

Key Considerations in Moving to Graviton2

For EC2 instances, it is a bit more involved as you will need to create a new instance, and migrate the data across and ensure your application is compatible with ARM processors. However, the cost savings can be significant so the investigation and testing is usually worth it.

Conclusion

The cost savings provided by Graviton are simply too good to be ignored, and there is certainly a business case that all new instances should be Graviton unless there is a specific reason not to.

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