Observations on ARM64 & AWS’s Amazon EC2 M6g Instances

Amazon's announcement of the AWS Graviton2 processor, designed to power M6g instances, offers a promising alternative to traditional x86-powered instances in terms of performance and cost, particularly for workloads built on the aarch64 architecture. The transition to Graviton2 requires recompilation of applications reliant on x86, but experimentation by Liz Fong-Jones at Honeycomb.io demonstrated significant benefits, such as lower costs and improved performance in specific use cases. Despite challenges in adapting to the new architecture, including recompiling dependencies and addressing compatibility issues, the effort resulted in a 30% reduction in instance usage and a 10% cost saving compared to current C5 instances, along with enhanced performance metrics. Although M6g instances are not yet widely available for production, the initial transition yielded compelling results, indicating potential long-term benefits once these instances are commercially accessible. Honeycomb.io's experience underscores the strategic advantages of adopting Graviton2, anticipating further integration as availability improves, while continuing to rely on C5 instances in the interim.