Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors are now generally available | Amazon Web Services
SEATTLE — Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, has officially announced the general availability of the Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instance families. Powered by the cutting-edge AWS Graviton5 processors—touted by the cloud giant as the most energy-efficient silicon it has ever engineered—these next-generation, memory-optimized virtual servers promise to redefine efficiency, security, and performance benchmarks for data-intensive cloud architectures worldwide.
The launch marks a significant leap forward in AWS’s proprietary silicon strategy. Delivering up to a 25% boost in compute performance over their predecessors, the Graviton4-backed R8g instances, the new R9g lineup targets the heaviest and most demanding enterprise workloads, ranging from distributed relational databases and in-memory caches to real-time big data analytics and large-scale containerized microservices.
Main Facts: What You Need to Know About R9g and R9gd
The introduction of the R9g and R9gd instances brings a profound architectural evolution to Amazon’s elastic compute portfolio. Designed explicitly for memory-bound applications, these machines combine raw processing power with advanced hardware offloading, high-speed networking, and mathematically proven security enhancements.
Core Performance and Architecture
At the heart of the R9g instances is the AWS Graviton5 processor. Compared to the previous generation, Graviton5 introduces a larger L3 cache, enhanced vCPU performance, faster memory architectures, and significantly higher network and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth. Crucially, these performance gains are achieved while simultaneously lowering overall energy consumption, aligning with enterprise corporate sustainability goals.
The R9g and R9gd instances are split into two primary offerings based on storage requirements:
- Amazon EC2 R9g Instances: Built for general memory-intensive applications utilizing network-attached Amazon EBS storage. They are ideal for relational databases, in-memory caches (such as Redis, Valkey, and Memcached), enterprise Java applications, and high-throughput web frameworks.
- Amazon EC2 R9gd Instances: Engineered with the exact same compute and networking prowess as the R9g line, but augmented with ultra-fast, low-latency, local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage. These are tailor-made for open-source databases, distributed real-time big data analytics, and large caching layers that demand immediate local scratch space.
Both instance families support Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC). This powerful feature allows cloud architects to dynamically adjust the allocation of bandwidth between Amazon EBS and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) networking by up to 25%, tailoring the hardware profile precisely to the bottlenecks of individual workloads.
Unprecedented Security via the Nitro Isolation Engine
Security remains a cornerstone of the new release. All R9g and R9gd servers run on the AWS Nitro System, which offloads virtualization, storage, and networking overhead to dedicated hardware, delivering near-bare-metal performance alongside ironclad isolation.
Building on the foundation laid earlier this year with the C9g and M9g instances, the R9g family integrates the Nitro Isolation Engine (NIE). The NIE is a purpose-built hardware and software component responsible for strictly enforcing isolation between virtual machines. It achieves this by carefully mediating all access to virtual machine memory, CPU register states, and I/O devices through a minimal, highly scrutinized set of APIs.
Setting a new industry benchmark, AWS has subjected the Nitro Isolation Engine to formal verification. Formal verification is a rigorous mathematical technique used to prove—rather than merely test—that a system’s hardware and software behave precisely as intended across all possible states, eliminating edge-case vulnerabilities. This achievement establishes the Nitro System as the cloud industry’s first formally verified hypervisor, offering mathematically absolute assurances of multi-tenant security isolation.
Chronology: The Evolution of AWS Custom Silicon
To understand the weight of the Graviton5 release, it is necessary to examine the rapid evolutionary arc of AWS’s custom-designed processors over the past several years.
- November 2018 (re:Invent): AWS introduces its very first custom Arm-based processor, the AWS Graviton, signaling a strategic shift away from total reliance on traditional x86 server architectures.
- December 2020: The launch of AWS Graviton2 shatters industry expectations, delivering a massive 40% improvement in price-performance over first-generation processors and establishing Arm chips as viable enterprise workhorses.
- November 2022: AWS unveils Graviton3, bringing enhanced floating-point performance, cryptographic acceleration, and optimized power efficiency to high-performance computing (HPC) and machine learning inference.
- November 2023: Graviton4 is introduced, further scaling core counts, memory bandwidth, and security features, rapidly integrated into the R8g memory-optimized family.
- September 2025: AWS officially rolls out Graviton5 and the general availability of the R9g and R9gd instance families, marking the debut of the Nitro Isolation Engine’s formal verification in memory-optimized enterprise compute.
Supporting Data: Specifications and Sizing
Both the R9g (EBS-only) and R9gd (local NVMe storage) families offer immense flexibility, scaling across 11 distinct instance sizes ranging from agile entry-level nodes to massive 192-vCPU metal servers.
Amazon EC2 R9g Specifications Matrix
| Instance Size | vCPUs | Memory (GiB) | Instance Storage | Network Bandwidth (Gbps) | EBS Bandwidth (Gbps) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| r9g.medium | 1 | 8 | EBS-Only | Up to 15 | Up to 12 |
| r9g.large | 2 | 16 | EBS-Only | Up to 15 | Up to 12 |
| r9g.xlarge | 4 | 32 | EBS-Only | Up to 15 | Up to 12 |
| r9g.2xlarge | 8 | 64 | EBS-Only | Up to 17 | Up to 12 |
| r9g.4xlarge | 16 | 128 | EBS-Only | Up to 17 | Up to 12 |
| r9g.8xlarge | 32 | 256 | EBS-Only | 17 | 12 |
| r9g.12xlarge | 48 | 384 | EBS-Only | 25 | 18 |
| r9g.16xlarge | 64 | 512 | EBS-Only | 34 | 24 |
| r9g.24xlarge | 96 | 768 | EBS-Only | 50 | 36 |
| r9g.48xlarge | 192 | 1536 | EBS-Only | 100 | 72 |
| r9g.metal–48xl | 192 | 1536 | EBS-Only | 100 | 72 |
Amazon EC2 R9gd Specifications Matrix (with Local NVMe SSD)
| Instance Size | vCPUs | Memory (GiB) | Instance Storage (NVMe SSD) | Network Bandwidth (Gbps) | EBS Bandwidth (Gbps) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| r9gd.medium | 1 | 8 | 1 x 59 GB | Up to 15 | Up to 12 |
| r9gd.large | 2 | 16 | 1 x 118 GB | Up to 15 | Up to 12 |
| r9gd.xlarge | 4 | 32 | 1 x 237 GB | Up to 15 | Up to 12 |
| r9gd.2xlarge | 8 | 64 | 1 x 474 GB | Up to 17 | Up to 12 |
| r9gd.2xlarge | 8 | 64 | 1 x 474 GB | Up to 17 | Up to 12 |
| r9gd.4xlarge | 16 | 128 | 1 x 950 GB | Up to 17 | Up to 12 |
| r9gd.8xlarge | 32 | 256 | 1 x 1900 GB | 17 | 12 |
| r9gd.12xlarge | 48 | 384 | 3 x 950 GB | 25 | 18 |
| r9gd.16xlarge | 64 | 512 | 1 x 3800 GB | 34 | 24 |
| r9gd.24xlarge | 96 | 768 | 3 x 1900 GB | 50 | 36 |
| r9gd.48xlarge | 192 | 1536 | 3 x 3800 GB | 100 | 72 |
| r9gd.metal–48xl | 192 | 1536 | 3 x 3800 GB | 100 | 72 |
Implications: Migration, Ecosystem, and Enterprise Impact
The rollout of R9g and R9gd instances carries wide-ranging implications for cloud engineering teams, corporate budgets, and security posture.
Frictionless Migration and Software Compatibility
For organizations currently utilizing R8g instances, transitioning to the R9g generation is designed to be frictionless. In most cases, applications require zero code changes. Modern open-source programming languages—including C/C++, Rust, Go, Java, Python, .NET Core, Node.js, Ruby, and PHP—offer native Arm64 support.
For containerized environments, multi-architecture container images built for Arm64 run natively across Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and standard Kubernetes deployments. Furthermore, AWS supports a broad spectrum of enterprise Linux distributions out of the box, including Amazon Linux 2023, Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 22.04+, RHEL 8.4+, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3+, and Debian 12+.
To streamline the adoption process, AWS provides a comprehensive suite of migration tools:
- AWS Graviton Getting Started Guide: Outlines best practices for building, compiling, and tuning workloads.
- Graviton Savings Dashboard: Enables real-time financial tracking of cost optimizations achieved through custom silicon.
- AWS Transform: Automates the complex code transformations often required when migrating legacy Java applications from x86 architectures to Graviton.
Pricing, Regional Availability, and Purchasing Options
Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances are immediately available across several key AWS Regions:
- US East (N. Virginia, Ohio)
- US West (Oregon)
- Europe (Frankfurt)
Enterprises can procure the new instances through multiple flexible purchasing models, including Savings Plans, On-Demand Instances, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, and Dedicated Hosts, allowing finance teams to balance cost-efficiency with workload stability.
The Security Paradigm Shift
The formal verification of the Nitro Isolation Engine represents a watershed moment for cloud computing. In an era where multi-tenant cloud security is constantly scrutinized, AWS’s ability to mathematically prove isolation eliminates ambiguity. For highly regulated industries—such as financial services, healthcare, and government defense—the R9g family offers an unprecedented level of computational trust without sacrificing the elasticity and cost benefits of public cloud infrastructure.
Getting Started
Cloud administrators and DevOps engineers can launch R9g and R9gd instances immediately via the Amazon EC2 Management Console. Detailed API documentation, regional availability trackers, and troubleshooting guides can also be queried programmatically using the newly released AWS MCP Server and associated plugins within preferred AI development environments.
Feedback and community discussions are actively monitored via the AWS re:Post for Amazon EC2 forums, while dedicated architectural assistance remains available through standard AWS Support channels.
