How Cheap is AWS Graviton2 ? 20% or 40% or 50% or 60%!

It has been more than 3.5 years since Graviton2 went GA(General Availability). However, there are still more insights to uncover regarding the cost-effectiveness of Graviton2 compared to x86. Graviton is widely marketed as 20% cheap from pure price perspective and upto 40% cheap when seeing from price-performance perspective. But for some regions graviton2 is insanely cheap, and for some workloads it can be upto 60% cheap. This post is an attempt to uncover those insights.

For all below scenarios only pure cost savings are considered excluding the performance benefits. Since the performance benefits are not guaranteed for all workloads.

Scenario: Savings by Migrating to Graviton in Each Region

While most regions you could save 20% by migrating to graviton, ap-south-1 and ap-south-2 you could saving almost 50% by migrating from x86 to graviton. And this is purely the cost savings excluding the performance benefits but those performance benefits are not guaranteed for all workloads so at minimum you would easily save 50% in costs and the workloads that get performance benefits can save another 10% i.e 60% in total costs reduction.

As seen from above graph, if you move from x86 to graviton in ap-south-1, you can save more than 50% in costs, while most of the other regions it's in the range of 20-25%.

Scenario: Migrating Existing Graviton Workloads from Other Regions to ap-south-1

Switching regions isn't a trivial task - it's a big move with its fair share of risks, so think it through before you dive in. A lot of factors need to be weighed in, such as end-user latency, data sovereignty, and the cost of one-time or continuous data transfer. Having said that if your workload fits the trade-offs, moving existing graviton workloads to ap-south-1 could save anywhere from 37% to whopping 60%.

Scenario: Migrate from x86 Workloads in Other Regions to Graviton in ap-south-1

As mentioned above migrating regions is a significant effort, but if you are planning to migrate to graviton from c5 instances, it might be a good idea to also consider migrating to ap-south-1 region, especially if you are in the APAC regions. Because for certain workloads migrating c5 to c6g itself is a huge task, so if you are already doing that, then it might be worth considering moving to ap-south-1.

Insight: Migrate Test Workloads, Dev Environments to ap-south-1

For most businesses, launching test workloads and dev environment in far away region is a non-issue because these workloads don't contain production customer data, and extra latency is also a non-issue for testing. Until a few years back us-east-1 was the most affordable region to launch test workloads, but now ap-south-1/ap-south-2 is going to be the cheapest if using graviton based instances.

Insight: No Savings in Other Types of Compute Workloads

While graviton ec2 is 50% cheaper than x86 in these regions, those savings are not propagated to other compute workloads in the region like Lambda, RDS, Elasticache. One notable exception is fargate whose arm price is half of x86 fargate price. Do refer to the earlier blog on fargate for more details.