New EC2 T4g Instances: AWS Graviton2 powered Burstable Performance

Sept. 22, 2020, 1:23 a.m.

TL;DR

AWS launched T4 g instances, a new generation of low cost burstable instance form powered by AWS Graviton2, a custom processor designed by AWS that uses 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores. T4g instances are optimized for applications that do not use maximum power CPUs much of the time, utilizing the same credit model as T3 instances with unrestricted mode allowed by default.

AWS Graviton processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2 (pixabay)

Key Facts

1
T3 instances of Amazon Elastic Storage Cloud (EC2) were first made available two years ago, providing a very cost-effective means of operating workloads for general purposes.
2
While current T3 instances provide reasonable compute capacity for many use cases, many clients have reported that they have additional workloads that would benefit from higher peak efficiency and lower costs.
3
AWS released T4 g instances, a new generation of low cost burstable instance sort powered by AWS Graviton2, a custom processor designed by AWS that uses 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores.
4
As of September 2020, T4g instances are available in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Mumbai), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland).
5
T4g instances are available in 7 sizes providing up to 5 Gbps of network and up to 2.7 Gbps of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) performance.

Details

T4g EC2 instances are available in 7 different sizes:

Name	vCPUs	Baseline Performance/vCPU	CPU Credits Earned/Hour	Memory
t4g.nano	2	5%	6	0.5 GiB
t4g.micro	2	10%	12	1 GiB
t4g.small	2	20%	24	2 GiB
t4g.medium	2	20%	24	4 GiB
t4g.large	2	30%	36	8 GiB
t4g.xlarge	4	40%	96	16 GiB
t4g.2xlarge	8	40%	192	32 GiB

T4g instances are available in 7 sizes (source: aws.amazon.com/blogs/)

Using T4g instances, you can enjoy a performance benefit of up to 40% at a 20% lower cost in comparison to T3 instances, providing the best price/performance for a broader spectrum of workloads.
Danilo Poccia
Chief evangelist (EMEA) at AWS