oday, Dave Brown, VP of Amazon EC2 at AWS, announced the Graviton Challenge as part of his session on AWS silicon innovation at the Six Five Summit 2021. We invite you to take the Graviton Challenge and move your applications to run on AWS Graviton2. The challenge, intended for individual developers and small teams, is based on the experiences of customers who’ve already migrated. It provides a framework of eight, approximately four-hour chunks to prepare, port, optimize, and finally deploy your application onto Graviton2 instances. Getting your application running on Graviton2, and enjoying the improved price performance, aren’t the only rewards. There are prizes and swag for those who complete the challenge!
AWS Graviton2 is a custom-built processor from AWS that’s based on the Arm64 architecture. It’s supported by popular Linux operating systems including Amazon Linux 2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Ubuntu. Compared to fifth-generation x86-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types, Graviton2 instance types have a 20% lower cost. Overall, customers who have moved applications to Graviton2 typically see up to 40% better price performance for a broad range of workloads including application servers, container-based applications, microservices, caching fleets, data analytics, video encoding, electronic design automation, gaming, open-source databases, and more.

Before I dive in to talk more about the challenge, check out the fun introductory video below from Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist, AWS and Dave Brown, Vice President, EC2. As Jeff mentions in the video: same exact workload, same or better performance, and up to 40% better price performance!
- Best adoption – enterprise
Based on the performance gains, total cost savings, number of instances the workload is running on, and time taken to migrate the workload (faster is better), for companies with over 1000 employees. The winner will also receive a chance to present at the conference. - Best adoption – small/medium business
Based on the performance gains, total cost savings, number of instances the workload is running on, and time taken to migrate the workload (faster is better), for companies with 100-1000 employees. The winner will also receive a chance to present at the conference. - Best adoption – startup
Based on the performance gains, total cost savings, number of instances the workload is running on, and time taken to migrate the workload (faster is better), for companies with fewer than 100 employees. The winner will also receive a chance to present at the conference. - Best new workload adoption
Awarded to a workload that’s new to EC2 (migrated to Graviton2 from on-premises, or other cloud) based on the performance gains, total cost savings, number of instances the workload is running on, and time taken to migrate the workload (faster is better). The winner will also receive a chance to participate in a video or written case study. - Most impactful adoption
Awarded to the workload with the biggest social impact based on details provided about what the workload/application does. Applications in this category are related to fields such as sustainability, healthcare and life sciences, conservation, learning/education, justice/equity. The winner will also receive a chance to participate in a video or written case study. - Most innovative adoption
Applications in this category solve unique problems for their customers, address new use cases, or are groundbreaking. The award will be based on the workload description, price performance gains, and total cost savings. The winner will also receive a chance to participate in a video or written case study.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migrate-your-workloads-with-the-graviton-challenge/