AWS Graviton: The Great Arm Migration

Bret and Nirmal are joined by Michael Fischer of AWS to discuss why we should use Graviton, their arm64 compute with AWS-designed CPUs.Graviton is AWS' term for their custom ARM-based EC2 instances. We now have all major clouds offering an ARM-based option for their server instances, but AWS was first, way back in 2018. Fast forward 6 years and AWS is releasing their 4th generation Graviton instances, and they deliver all the CPU, networking, memory and storage performance that you'd expect from their x86 instances and beyond.

I'm a big fan of ARM-based servers and the price points that AWS gives us. They have been my default EC2 instance type for years now, and I recommend it for all projects I'm working on with companies.

We get into the history of Graviton, how easy it is to build and deploy containers and Kubernetes clusters that have Graviton and even two different platform types in the same cluster. We also cover how to build multi-platform images using Docker BuildKit.

Be sure to check out the live recording of the complete show from May 9, 2024 on YouTube (Ep. 265). Includes demos.

★Topics★Graviton + GitLab + EKSPorting Advisor for GravitonGraviton Getting Started

Creators & Guests

• Cristi Cotovan - Editor
• Beth Fisher - Producer
• Bret Fisher - Host
• Nirmal Mehta - Host
• Michael Fischer - Guest

• (00:00) - Intro
• (06:19) - AWS and ARM64: Evolution to Graviton 4
• (07:55) - AWS EC2 Nitro: Why and How?
• (11:53) - Nitro and Graviton's Evolution
• (18:35) - What Can't Run on Graviton?
• (23:15) - Moving Your Workloads to Graviton
• (27:19) - K8s Tooling and Multi-Platform Images
• (37:07) - Tips for Getting Started with Graviton

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