Graviton lowers cloud bills with better price and performance

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 33:29

   And since then, Graviton made tremendous progress. So what was the thinking that led to saying, look, we're going to do our own thing, and then how has that progress been? It's actually a fascinating story, and I think it's a great example of where Amazon AWS will innovate and will iterate over time and continue to think bigger about what we can do, but kind of prove our way there as opposed to, you know.

2. 33:57

   And so, to take this as an example, it's probably about 13, 14 years ago, we were seeing that there was a pretty significant virtualization tax on the overall number of resources. And we were kind of thinking about how do we, our customers were telling us, I want bare metal performance, and they're comparing having all the resources of a server. And so the first thing that we did is that we took a network offload card and virtualized all of our network virtualization and pulled it off into an offload card so that network virtualization got closer to bare metal performance.

3. 34:36

   And back then it was not quite bare metal, but it was closer. And then we got really excited about that. We said, okay, what if we could move storage virtualization off as well? And none of the network offload cards could do that. And then we found this one company who had some ARM cores on an offload card. And they were doing it for other reasons. I can't remember their original purpose. But we're like, could you use those to do storage virtualization and some of these other functions?

4. 35:00

   And we're like, maybe. And so we really iterated with them. This was the Annapurna team. Yeah, this is the Annapurna team. And just loved that team. Like really innovative, really mission-driven, really wanting to solve problems. And so we acquired them. And we said, look, could you build us a Slightly Buried card that actually could take all the network virtualization off and basically give us a bare metal server that has no virtualization on it, no VM virtualization, everything is through APIs on the card.

5. 35:24

   And because we had this view that, one, performance would be much better, resource utilization would be better. The security isolation. And security isolation would be much, much better. And we tell people, could then legitimately tell people, we have no access to any of your VMs that are running there. And this has been a huge benefit for us for the last decade, where frankly, we have been leading and others have been kind of slow to do this because this is not a generalized thing that people can do.

6. 35:51

   But so we got to that and we basically said, look, we're making a lot of progress here. What if we take, you know, and there's a bunch of ARM cores that were on this offload card. And we said, what if we turn that into a server? And we did that first with Graviton. It was a very underpowered, very small server that we launched. And customers were excited. They're like, I'd love to have an ARM server.

7. 36:13

   This is super interesting. And so we went down the path and Graviton, And part of what we did is we looked and saw that there's the slope of, you know, arm cores were getting faster. And where you saw the power utilization and the graph, and you knew the intercept was going to happen for where this architecture was going to be really good for parts. And they just needed somebody to drive the ecosystem and get some of the pieces in place.

8. 36:37

   So we did that with Graviton. And Graviton's been a runaway hit at this point. Have you been public about what percent of your fleet is Graviton? We land more Graviton ships every year than any other type. So it's very popular. And it's, you know, look, they're 20% cheaper at a 20% better performance and have been like that for the last kind of five, six years. So that's an easy value proposition.

9. 37:06

   And I think the vast majority, something like 90 plus percent of our top 100 customers all use Graviton in some way, shape, or form across their fleets. And so that's been a huge win for us and for customers. It's been the single easiest way that customers lower their bill is to move to Graviton. We have examples where people have moved their whole fleets and cut the number of servers they had in half.

10. 37:28

    That performance is so much better.