Instances eligible for Graviton (ARM)
Graviton is AWS's own ARM processor, and the same workload usually costs less on it — on EC2 and on RDS.
What this problem is
Graviton is the line of ARM processors AWS designs and builds itself. Because it pays no third-party architecture licence, it passes the difference on in price: for the same vCPU and memory, a Graviton instance consistently costs less than its x86 equivalent, with equal or better performance across a good share of workloads.
What varies is the cost of migrating, and that depends entirely on what runs there. An application in Go, Java, Python, Node or modern .NET is usually a recompile away, or not even that — a multi-architecture container image settles it. A proprietary binary with no ARM build, a native driver, or a dependency compiled without ARM support blocks the migration outright.
On RDS the conversation is simpler: the database is managed by AWS, not by you, so moving from an x86 class to its Graviton equivalent is an instance class change. The application never finds out — it speaks the same protocol to the same engine.
How we detect it
For EC2, we read compute spend by instance type from Cost Explorer with GetCostAndUsage and check which types have a Graviton equivalent. For RDS, we list instances with DescribeDBInstances and compare the current class against its Graviton counterpart.
- EC2 instances eligible for Graviton (ARM)
- RDS databases eligible for Graviton
What it costs
The list-price gap between an x86 family and its Graviton equivalent typically runs around 20% on EC2 and 10% on RDS, varying by family and region. The real gain depends on your workload running as well on ARM.
Public AWS list prices, us-east-1, subject to change. The figure in your report is computed against your resources in your regions.
How it appears in the report
An illustrative example, with invented resources and figures. In the report each finding carries the real resource, its region, and the fix command where a safe one exists.
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