Amazon VGT2 Las Vegas: Celebrating the Winners of the AWS Graviton Challenge Contest and Hackathon

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At AWS, our commitment to innovation ensures that our customers can efficiently run a wide array of workloads with optimal pricing and performance. With over 475 EC2 instance types available, we provide diverse options in compute, memory, networking, and storage tailored to meet various workload requirements. In collaboration with our silicon partners, we also manufacture our own processors to expand choices for our customers.

The AWS Graviton processor family exemplifies this initiative, aiming to enhance price-performance ratios for numerous customer workloads in EC2. Currently, there are 12 EC2 instance families powered by AWS Graviton2 processors, which include general purpose (M6g, M6gd), burstable (T4g), compute optimized (C6g, C6gd, C6gn), memory optimized (R6g, R6gd, X2gd), storage optimized (Im4gn, Is4gen), and accelerated computing (G5g) available across 23 AWS Regions. We recently revealed the preview of Amazon EC2 C7g instances, utilizing the latest AWS Graviton3 processors, which promise to deliver superior price performance for compute-heavy workloads. Major customers, such as Discovery and Formula 1, have leveraged AWS Graviton-based instances and enjoyed substantial price-performance advantages. Notably, AWS Graviton instances contributed significantly to Amazon Prime Day 2021, supporting a dozen core retail services during the high-traffic two-day shopping event.

To facilitate the transition to Graviton-based instances, we initiated the Graviton Challenge. Our observations revealed that many successful migrations stemmed from one or two developers dedicating a few days to benchmark price-performance gains. The Graviton Challenge offers a clearly defined framework for developers to migrate their initial workloads to Graviton-based instances. Alongside this challenge, we launched a Contest (limited to the U.S.) and a global Hackathon, inviting developers to compete for prizes by creating new applications or migrating existing ones to Graviton2-based instances. Over a thousand participants—comprising enterprises, startups, individual developers, and open-source contributors—registered and showcased various applications on Graviton instances, achieving remarkable price-performance benefits. Here are some of the standout performances we wish to highlight.

Graviton Challenge Contest Winners:

1. Best Adoption – Enterprise and Most Impactful Adoption: The SRE team from Tech Innovations, which migrated 60 microservices written in Java, Rust, and Golang to Graviton2-based general purpose and compute optimized instances, achieving up to 48% latency reduction and 22% cost savings.
2. Best Adoption – Startup: Streamline Co., which saw up to 48% performance improvement and 25% potential cost savings for its container streaming platform developed in C/C++ and Python.
3. Best New Workload Adoption: Alex Ramirez, who developed a dynamic tile server using Golang on Graviton2-based memory-optimized instances that enabled analysts to efficiently query large geospatial datasets, achieving up to 1.8x performance gains over similar x86-based instances.
4. Most Innovative Adoption: LinguaBot, an application that translates text into spoken language across multiple languages using Graviton2 instances, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Translate.

For those attending AWS re:Invent 2021, further insights into Graviton adoption experiences can be gained by attending the CMP213: Lessons learned from customers who have adopted AWS Graviton chalk talk.

Winners of the Graviton Challenge Hackathon:

1. Best New App: PickYourPlace, an open-source data analytics platform that assists users in selecting residential locations based on property value, safety, and accessibility.
2. Best Migrated App: SnapCheck, an image credibility checker powered by deep learning, which evaluates the authenticity of images.
3. Highest Potential Impact: Casey O’Brien, an AWS Community Builder, for transitioning major big data platforms like Spark, Dremio, and AirByte to Graviton2 instances, allowing developers to integrate big data capabilities into their applications.
4. Most Creative Use Case: VITAL, a cost-effective custom Oximeter featuring mobile and web applications that support continuous and remote monitoring to help prevent fatalities from Silent Hypoxia.
5. Best Technical Implementation: Harmony Bot, which streams songs, playlists, or podcasts in a Discord voice channel, enabling users to enjoy music together.

The enthusiasm and benefits realized by our customers have been truly inspiring. We extend our gratitude to our judges—Megan Lark from Cloud Insights, David Reed from TechReview, and Laura James from SecureTech—for their invaluable contributions.

Beyond EC2, numerous AWS services for databases, analytics, and serverless options are now compatible with Graviton-based instances. These include Amazon Aurora, RDS, and AWS Lambda, among others. Utilizing these managed services on Graviton2 instances enables customers to reap significant price-performance benefits with little or no code adjustments. Additionally, we have integrated Graviton support into key AWS infrastructure services like Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon EKS, ensuring that customers can efficiently build, run, and scale their applications on Graviton-based instances. A wide range of Linux and BSD operating systems, along with partner solutions for security, monitoring, containers, CI/CD, and more, also now support Graviton instances. Recently, we launched the AWS Graviton Ready program within the AWS Service Ready framework to deliver Graviton-certified solutions to our customers.

Congratulations to all the winners of the Contest and Hackathon! For a complete list of winners, visit the Graviton Challenge page. Even though the Contest and Hackathon have concluded, developers can still access the step-by-step guide on the Graviton Challenge page to migrate their workloads to Graviton-based instances. For more information on this topic, check out this excellent resource provided by Training Industry.