Graviton5 in Production at Honeycomb: Per-service Results From the m8g to m9g Migration

In the fourth installment of the Graviton retrospective series, Honeycomb conducted a detailed analysis comparing the AWS Graviton4 and Graviton5 processors by running identical workloads on both in a Kubernetes namespace. Over a 60-day period, it was observed that Graviton5 demonstrated significant CPU efficiency, using 11-26% less CPU for the same workload, and improved performance with a 28% reduction in ingest P99 latency and a halving of the metrics ingest pipeline P99. Tail-based sampling queues were notably shorter by 44-73% at P95, without any regressions across the fleet. The evaluation was conducted using a read-only Canvas to facilitate public interaction with the data. Key services like shepherd, refinery, beagle, newf, and kelpie showed marked improvements, with CPU efficiency gains indicating potential for further cost savings through capacity tuning. This study highlights the substantial performance advantages and opportunities for cost reduction when migrating to Graviton5, making it a compelling choice for those using previous Graviton generations or considering a shift from x86 architectures.