Amazon Web Services has made its new memory-optimized EC2 R9g and R9gd instances generally available, powered by the AWS Graviton5 processor. The company says the R9g instances deliver up to 25% better compute performance per vCPU compared to the Graviton4-based R8g instances, and it calls Graviton5 the most energy efficient processor AWS has ever built.
The instances target memory-intensive workloads such as databases, in-memory caches like Valkey and Redis, real-time big data analytics, and containerized applications running on Kubernetes, Docker, EKS, or ECS. R9gd adds local NVMe-based SSD storage for workloads needing fast, low-latency scratch space or temporary caches, including open-source databases and large caching workloads.
Both instance families come in 11 sizes each, from medium up to metal-48xl. The largest size, r9g.48xlarge, offers 192 vCPUs, 1536 GiB of memory, up to 100 Gbps network bandwidth, and up to 72 Gbps EBS bandwidth. R9gd sizes include local NVMe storage ranging from a single 59 GB drive on the medium to three 3800 GB drives on the largest sizes.
Graviton5 brings several hardware upgrades over Graviton4, including DDR5 8800 MT/s memory, which AWS says is the fastest memory available in the cloud, a 5x larger L3 cache, up to 2x higher network and EBS bandwidth on the largest sizes, and up to 3x higher packet-processing performance. The instances also support Instance Bandwidth Configuration, letting users adjust bandwidth allocation between EBS and VPC networking by 25%.
All R9g and R9gd instances run on the AWS Nitro System and include the Nitro Isolation Engine, a feature introduced with the C9g and M9g instances earlier this year. AWS says the Nitro Isolation Engine uses formal verification to provide mathematically proven isolation between virtual machines, making Nitro the first formally verified cloud hypervisor.
The instances are available today in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions. They can be purchased through Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, or Dedicated Hosts. Pricing details are on the Amazon EC2 pricing page.
For users migrating from R8g, AWS says no code changes are required for most applications, and multi-arch container images built for Arm64 run without changes. Supported operating systems include Amazon Linux 2023, Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 22.04+, RHEL 8.4+, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3+, and Debian 12+.
The launch follows the June availability of the compute-optimized C9g and C9gd instances, which also use Graviton5.
