Real-World Cost Savings from Switching to AWS Graviton Instances

AWS Graviton instances promise up to 40% cost savings over comparable x86 servers for scale-out workloads. But what does that translate to in terms of actual dollar savings?

Let’s run the numbers on a sample deployment to quantify the economies realizable by switching existing infrastructure to Graviton:

Test Infrastructure Configuration

For comparability, we will benchmark a production-grade infrastructure stack with following components:

– Load Balanced Web Servers (4x c5.xlarge)

– Container Orchestration Nodes (2x m5.2xlarge)

– In-Memory Redis Backing Store (2x r5.large)

– Total 8 EC2 Instances

Monthly Cost Comparison

Running above stack on x86 instances totals around $1,680 monthly on-demand.

The Graviton-equivalent configuration replaces c5, m5 and r5 instances with c6g, m6g and r6g families costing $1,020 monthly – translating to ~40% drop.

Cost Savings Breakdown

– Web Server Cost: $720 (x86) vs $416 (Graviton)

– Orchestration Cost: $448 (x86) vs $272 (Graviton)

– Caching Cost: $176 (x86) vs $96 (Graviton)

This scales linearly for bigger deployments with even more dramatic savings.

Simplifying Decision Making

Graviton’s value proposition goes beyond raw infrastructure costs. Consistent high performance unlocks opportunities otherwise unattainable for teams budget-wise.

The considerable cost reductions make it an easy decision to evolve infrastructure onto Graviton instances – enabling smaller players to competitively punch above their weight.

What savings outcomes are you projecting for migrating to Graviton? Share your scenarios for us to benchmark!