For those of you considering alternate instance types remember that it it is important to do scientific benchmarks.

I just completed a us-west to us-east migration for a client because after a lengthy benchmark session we learned that the instances we really needed for our specific workload could not be AMD based. I tried a handful of AMD boxes and sent them through the ringer, but the Intel boxes always came out on top. The cost of these is significantly lower in us-east, hence the migration.

Not to knock AMD, but in the presented configuration from AWS the comparative Intel<>AMD instance types vary greatly. There is also no compute-heavy instance type from AMD at this time (AFAIK please correct me).

For reference our workload is network (outside AWS), Compute and RAM heavy. The c5.2xlarge seems to be the sweet spot as far as cost/performance.

So if you’re considering Graviton, make sure to design and run some real benchmarks. For us (in the AMD scenario) things looked real good on paper but after benchmarking the performance was not there.