For businesses looking to reduce costs, but not lose team members, AWS processor Graviton offers cost savings, high performance and energy efficiency. It is also scalable and secure. AC3’s Greg Cockburn says there are many benefits to Graviton, a 64-bit ARM-based CPU from AWS, specifically designed to be used by AWS servers.
“It’s suggested to have better performance for workloads,” Cockburn says of the processor. “The architecture has been around for a very long time. Maybe even the late 1970s or 80s. It’s an open source architecture that’s easily licensable.” It can be a big decision to move over to Graviton, and Cockburn says that it will likely depend on what operating system you’re already using.
“If you’re using a Windows Microsoft system at the moment, it’s a little tricky,” he tells Three. “That architecture is still in its infancy stage. You do need to be using the Linux- based operating system.”
From there, it’s also about the application. “If you’re using any specific instructions on the 64-based architecture, it’s something to consider. But if you’re using anything like Java it’ll pretty much switch straight over,” Cockburn adds. Performance results have been significant too. Testing scenarios have identified a 30 to 40 percent increase in performance. This will often mean a reduction of incident size across an organisation’s fleet. And this also results in financial savings, because the architecture costs are met by AWS.
THE UNIQUE FEATURES OF GRAVITON
Graviton is a risk-based processor, with less instruction. In some instances, this can be detrimental to a workload, but on the plus side fewer instructions means that a compiler doesn’t have to go through as many iterations to be able to get to a binary for running on the incidents. Real world use cases of Graviton are customers that have been using open source databases – including MySQL, Elasticsearch and OpenSearch – and have witnessed a drop in replacement.
“It’s very simple to migrate from the existing based architecture of those and switch them over,” Cockburn explains.
He understands Graviton well, as he’s been working on the processor since its 2018 release. As a result, he understands the benchmarks for the system.
“During the COVID times, I sat down and created benchmarks and wrote some blog posts about it,” he says.
“I used a very common WordPress- based application, and I looked at the differences of the application CPU being compared to Intel, the AMD, as well as the Graviton ARM-based processor. And, when you compared them all, the ARM was the clear winner.
“And that’s not taking into account the price. When that was also considered, it really shone.” For those looking to migrate? “Do it!” advises Cockburn.
“If you’re not running Windows, then there’s a 95 percent chance that this is going to work,” he continues. “Don’t be afraid. It’s a really simple process, with just fantastic offerings.”