Today, Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances are generally available, powered by AWS Graviton5 processors. R9g instances are memory-optimized and deliver up to 25% better compute performance compared to Graviton4-based R8g instances, powered by the most energy efficient processor AWS has ever built.

R9g instances are ideal for memory-intensive workloads including databases, in-memory caches (Valkey, Redis, MemCached), real-time big data analytics, Linux-based workloads including containerized and micro-service-based applications (e.g. Kubernetes, Docker, EKS, ECS), as well as applications written in popular programming languages such as C/C++, Rust, Go, Java, Python, .NET Core, Node.js, Ruby, and PHP.

R9gd instances include local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage, ideal for memory-intensive workloads requiring fast, low-latency local storage such as open-source databases, distributed real-time big data analytics, large in-memory databases, and large caching workloads.

If you’re running workloads on R8g instances today, R9g gives you more performance per vCPU with faster memory, higher network and Amazon EBS bandwidth, and a larger L3 cache, all while using less energy.

What makes R9g different
Graviton5 processors bring several hardware improvements over Graviton4:

• Up to 25% higher compute performance per vCPU
• DDR5 8800 MT/s memory (up from 5600 MT/s in Graviton4), the fastest memory available in the cloud
• 5x larger L3 cache for better data locality
• Up to 2x higher network and EBS bandwidth for the largest instance sizes (up to 100 Gbps network, up to 72 Gbps EBS on the 48xlarge)
• Up to 3x higher packet-processing performance

R9g and R9gd instances support Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC), which lets you adjust the allocation of bandwidth between Amazon EBS and Amazon VPC networking by 25%. This helps optimize performance for workloads with specific bandwidth requirements such as databases and caching.

All R9g and R9gd instances run on the AWS Nitro System, which offloads virtualization, storage, and networking to dedicated hardware. This gives your applications near-bare-metal performance while maintaining strong security isolation between instances.

R9g and R9gd instances feature the Nitro Isolation Engine (NIE), the same enhancement to the Nitro System introduced with C9g and M9g instances earlier this year, which enforces isolation of instances and harnesses formal verification to provide assurances of isolation with mathematical precision. Nitro Isolation Engine is a purpose-built component that is responsible for enforcing isolation between virtual machines, including mediation of all access to virtual machine memory, CPU register state, and I/O devices through a minimal set of APIs. Nitro Isolation Engine leverages formal verification, a technique to mathematically demonstrate that the hardware or software behaves as intended, and not just in specific test cases. This intensive verification technique establishes Nitro as the first formally verified cloud hypervisor, pioneering a new standard for mathematically proven cloud security. To learn more about the Nitro Isolation Engine, visit the blog post. For details on the formal verification results, including scope and assumptions, see the technical white paper.

EC2 R9g and R9gd instance specifications
R9g and R9gd instances are each available in 11 sizes, from medium to metal-48xl. The following tables show the full specifications for each size.

R9gd instances offer the same compute and networking performance as R9g, with the addition of local NVMe-based SSD storage for workloads that need fast, low-latency scratch space or temporary caches.

Getting started
You can launch R9g and R9gd instances from the Amazon EC2 console using any supported Arm-based AMI. R9g instances support Amazon Linux 2023, Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 22.04+, RHEL 8.4+, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3+, Debian 12+, and other major Linux distributions.

If you’re migrating from R8g, no code changes are required for most applications. Select the equivalent R9g instance size and your application runs with better performance. For containerized workloads, R9g works with Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and standard Kubernetes deployments. Multi-arch container images built for Arm64 run without changes.

Several resources help you get started: the AWS Graviton Getting Started Guide covers how to build, run, and optimize workloads on Graviton-based instances. The Graviton Savings Dashboard helps you track cost savings. AWS Transform automates code transformations for migrating Java applications from x86 to Graviton. To learn more, visit AWS Graviton Processors or Level up your compute with AWS Graviton.

Pricing and availability
Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances are available in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions.

R9g and R9gd instances are available for purchase through Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, or Dedicated Hosts. For detailed pricing, visit the Amazon EC2 pricing page.

Ready to get started? Launch R9g instances from the Amazon EC2 console. For more details, visit the Amazon EC2 R9g instances page.

If you want to call APIs, search documentation, find regional availability, and check troubleshooting about this feature, try using the AWS MCP Server and plugins with your preferred AI tool. Share your feedback on AWS re:Post for Amazon EC2 or reach out through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Daniel Abib