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During the last AWS re:Invent 2018, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced new EC2 Instances (A1) Powered by ARM-based AWS Graviton Processors, which promise cost savings up to 45 percent for certain workloads.

Built around ARM cores and making extensive use of custom-built silicon, the A1 instances are optimized for performance and cost. They are a great fit for scale-out workloads where you can share the load across a group of smaller instances. This includes containerized microservices, web servers, development environments, and caching fleets.

The ARM® Neoverse™ is a new brand for the architectures, products, and solutions that ARM specifically design for the rapidly transforming cloud to edge internet infrastructure needed to enable a world of a trillion intelligent devices.

AWS Graviton is a world-class processor built by Annapurna Labs, a wholly owned AWS subsidiary, based on the Arm Neoverse “Cosmos” platform, and specifically built to run customer application workloads. When AWS acquired Annapurna Labs in 2015, the company started to think about building a custom CPU that could scale on the cloud workload.

The ARM-based Graviton processors are powering all new Amazon EC2 A1 instances.  The new instances will lower costs by up to 45%, and are being targeted for scale-out workloads, including containerized microservices, web servers, development environments, and caching fleets.

The A1 instances are available in five sizes, all EBS-Optimized by default, at a significantly lower cost:

Instance Name vCPUs
 RAM
 EBS Bandwidth Network Bandwidth On-Demand Price/Hour
US East (N. Virginia)
a1.medium 1 2 GiB Up to 3.5 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps $0.0255
a1.large 2 4 GiB Up to 3.5 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps $0.0510
a1.xlarge 4 8 GiB Up to 3.5 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps $0.1020
a1.2xlarge 8 16 GiB Up to 3.5 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps $0.2040
a1.4xlarge 16 32 GiB 3.5 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps $0.4080

The A1 instances are available now in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) regions in on-demand, reserved instances, spot, dedicated instances, and dedicated host form, and is supported by Amazon Linux 2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu, with AWS noting additional operating system support is on the way.

Will this new offer bring more attention on Virtualization with ARM based servers?

Will be possible, in the future, that VMware ESXi for ARM will make more sense with new use cases?

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.