When Amazon Web Services unveiled its AWS Graviton Arm processor in 2018, it was targeting loosely coupled scale-out workloads like web servers, log processing and caching with instances that appealed to customers like SmugMug who felt they were overpaying for premium compute when a smaller core would do the job. The Arm-based compute instances serves as an alternative to X86-based services used by the vast majority of the cloud giant’s customers.

In many ways, that was about priming the ecosystem, David Brown, Vice President of Amazon EC2 told the New Stack. “We wanted to signal to the ecosystem that Arm server chips were going to be real and we were going to be bringing them out.”

Getting the ecosystem ready meant Graviton2 could quickly power not just EC2 instances but increasing numbers of AWS services including Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache (where Graviton2 is actually the default) and container services like Amazon EKS.

It’s only where customers are choosing a processor architecture that Graviton will be visible; in the “vast majority of services” customers will never see that the service is running on Arm, but he suggested that many will be.

Moving AWS services to Arm has also helped get the ecosystem ready for customer workloads, Brown noted. “That’s giving us a lot of experience internally, about what customers would go through as well as making sure in the ecosystem that we reach out to the various players and getting things resolved with tools we can build and things we can do to help.”

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