Amazon EC2 T4g Instances

With T4g instances, customers can optimize for both higher performance and lower cost per vCPU. T4g instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances for a large number of applications built on open-source software utilizing Linux distributions. T4g instances also deliver 40% higher peak performance than T3 instances, enabling customers to migrate production workloads to T4g instances more effectively.

T4g instances add to the broadest and deepest selection of EC2 instances and enable customers to run a broad set of burstable general purpose workloads such as large scale micro-services, small and medium databases, and virtual desktops. Developers can also build Arm applications natively in the cloud while leveraging the flexibility, security, reliability and scalability of running on EC2.

T4g instances are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors and built on the AWS Nitro System. AWS Graviton2 processors feature always-on 256-bit DRAM encryption and 50% faster per core encryption performance compared to first-generation AWS Graviton. The AWS Nitro System is a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances for better overall performance and security. T4g instances also support encrypted EBS storage volumes by default.

AWS Graviton2-based EC2 instances are supported by popular Linux operating systems including Amazon Linux 2, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu. Many popular applications and services from AWS and Independent Software Vendors also support AWS Graviton2-based instances, including Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECR, Amazon CodeBuild, Amazon CodeCommit, Amazon CodePipeline, Amazon CodeDeploy, Amazon CloudWatch, Crowdstrike, Datadog, Docker, Drone, Dynatrace, GitLab, Jenkins, NGINX, Qualys, Rancher, Rapid7, Tenable, and TravisCI.

T4g instances are designed to run the majority of general purpose workloads at a much lower cost. T4g instances work by providing a baseline level of CPU performance to address many common workloads while providing the ability to burst above the baseline for times when more performance is required. T4g instances make use of credits to track how much CPU is used. T4g instances accumulate CPU credits when a workload is operating below the baseline threshold and utilize credits when running above the baseline threshold. With T4g instances, customers can sustain high CPU performance, whenever and for however long it is required.

T4g instances start in unlimited mode by default, giving users the ability to sustain high CPU performance over any desired time frame while keeping cost as low as possible. For most general purpose workloads, T4g instances in unlimited mode provide ample performance without any additional charges. If the average CPU utilization of a T4g instance is lower than the baseline over a 24-hour period, the hourly instance price automatically covers all interim spikes in usage. In the cases when a T4g instance needs to run at higher CPU utilization for a prolonged period, it can do so for a small additional charge of $0.04 per vCPU-hour. In standard mode, a T4g instance can burst until it uses up all of its earned credits. For more details on T4g credits, please see the EC2 documentation page.

AWS Graviton2 Processors are based on 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS for optimized performance and cost. AWS Graviton2 Processors deliver 7x higher performance, 4x the number of compute cores, 2x larger caches, and 5x faster memory versus first-generation AWS Graviton Processors.

The AWS Nitro System is a rich collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware and software to deliver high performance, high availability, and high security while also reducing virtualization overhead.