Posted On: Mar 12, 2021

AWS Graviton2-based database instances are now generally available for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora MySQL Compatible Edition. Graviton2 instances provide up to 20% performance improvement and up to 35% price/performance improvement for Aurora depending on database size. You can also mix and match Graviton2 R6g and Intel R5 instances within the same cluster for your primary instance or for your read replica, enabling you to maximize price/performance improvements based on workload requirements. Graviton2 instances are already generally available for Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, and Amazon RDS for MariaDB.

AWS Graviton2 processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and deliver several performance optimizations over first-generation AWS Graviton processors. This includes 7x the performance, 4x the number of compute cores, 2x larger private caches per core, 5x faster memory, and 2x faster floating-point performance per core. Additionally, the AWS Graviton2 processors feature always-on fully encrypted DDR4 memory and 50% faster per core encryption performance. These performance improvements make Graviton2 R6g database instances a great choice for database workloads.

You can launch Graviton2 R6g database instances in the Amazon RDS Management Console or using the AWS CLI. Upgrading an Aurora database instance to Graviton2 requires a simple instance type modification if you are on a supported database version, using the same steps as any other instance modification. Your applications will continue to work as normal and you will not have to port application code. For more details on database version support refer to Aurora instance documentation. For more details, refer to the Aurora documentation.

The R6g database instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Northern California, Oregon), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt, London), South America (Sao Paulo), Canada (Central), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo) regions.

Click here to launch your first Aurora Graviton2 instance. For complete information on pricing and regional availability, please refer to the Amazon Aurora pricing page. Watch Tony Petrossian, GM for Amazon Aurora at AWS, discuss the advantages of AWS Graviton2 on Aurora.  You can also view James Hamilton, VP and Distinguished Engineer at AWS, talk about AWS Graviton2 and open source databases.