As an NGINX user, you are probably familiar with Arm as an IP provider for smartphones, but you might not know that Arm also delivers solutions for a range of infrastructures, from cloud to edge. Arm has been investing in an infrastructure‑focused roadmap for a number of years and recently launched the Arm Neoverse brand specifically to deliver cloud to edge architectures, products, and solutions. The Arm Neoverse architecture is well‑suited for scale‑out, cloud‑native workloads like NGINX and NGINX Plus.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced the Amazon EC2 A1 instance, based on the Arm Neoverse platform, at AWS re:Invent 2018. These instances use the AWS Nitro System and are the first instances powered by the AWS Graviton Processor, which features 64‑bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS. Amazon EC2 A1 instances deliver up to 45% cost savings for Arm‑native and modern scale‑out applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, caching fleets, and distributed data stores that are supported by the extensive Arm ecosystem.
To provide customers with more specific guidance on how to achieve these cost benefits, our team conducted performance testing of NGINX Plus as a reverse proxy and API gateway on multiple EC2 instances. Based on our analysis, Amazon EC2 A1 instances deliver up to 40% cost savings versus other EC2 configurations when configured as a reverse proxy or an API gateway, and serving up to 25,000 requests per second. This is great news for NGINX Plus customers on AWS.
Let’s look at some details. The graph above showcases the cost per hour to run a three‑node deployment of each of the EC2 instance types (a1, c5, m5, and m5a) in the smallest size required to serve the indicated number of requests per second (RPS). These values are based on the maximum RPS for each instance type. Cost increases when an instance size is upgraded from small to medium to large, and so on. In real world deployments, customers can further right‑size their instances by combining multiple sizes. For more technical details, please download our white paper.
Arm and AWS will be at NGINX Conf 2019 so please stop by the Arm booth, join the keynote fireside chat, and attend our break‑out session. We would like to get your feedback on how the A1 instances could deliver value for your NGINX Plus deployments on AWS.
Learn more about Arm Neoverse
Learn more about AWS EC2 A1 instances
Want to try NGINX Plus on an Amazon EC2 A1 instance? Start your free 30-day trial today or contact NGINX to discuss your use cases.
