Why Every Engineering Team Should Embrace AWS Graviton4
Blog post from Honeycomb
As a launch customer of Amazon EC2 R8g instances powered by AWS Graviton4, this blog shares detailed performance insights and challenges encountered during the transition from Graviton3 to Graviton4. The Graviton4 processors demonstrated significant improvements, including a 22-24% decrease in processing time for various requests and a 10% reduction in CPU utilization while handling 23% more requests per task. However, issues arose with network buffering and slow-sending clients, necessitating a reevaluation of instrumentation to accurately measure network and processing times. Additionally, the Graviton4 processors dropped support for the 32-bit instruction state, causing compatibility issues with certain software. Despite these challenges, the transition to Graviton4 has resulted in more than double the throughput per vCPU compared to the start of their Graviton journey, underscoring the advantages of leveraging AWS's silicon innovation without the need for significant capital expenditure. The migration to Graviton4 is expected to enhance Honeycomb's ability to provide best-in-class observability at a predictable price, supporting distributed tracing and trace-level analytics across numerous microservices.