AWS brings EC2 R8gd to European Sovereign Cloud in Germany

Availability in Germany

AWS announced on October 9, 2026, that Amazon EC2 R8gd instances are available in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (Germany) region. The regional expansion adds an option for teams seeking Graviton4 processors with local NVMe storage. AWS announcement

Graviton4, local NVMe and bandwidth controls

R8gd instances use AWS Graviton4 processors and the AWS Nitro System, with up to 11.4 TB of local NVMe-based SSD block storage. AWS claims up to 30% better performance than Graviton3-based instances. Treat that as a vendor-stated comparison, not a guaranteed improvement for an individual application. AWS specifications

The family spans 12 sizes, with up to 50 Gbps of network bandwidth and up to 40 Gbps of Amazon EBS bandwidth. AWS also says customers can adjust network and EBS bandwidth by 25% using EC2 instance bandwidth weighting. These family-level maximums should not be read as the specification for every size. AWS bandwidth details

AWS lists Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking support on four sizes: 24xlarge, 48xlarge, metal-24xl and metal-48xl. Teams planning EFA-dependent deployments should check their size selection against that list. AWS EFA availability details

Benchmark the bottleneck before choosing a size

For engineering teams, the useful distinction is between local-storage demand, EBS traffic and network traffic. A workload constrained by one path may gain little from a higher ceiling on another. Treat bandwidth weighting as a tuning variable to test against measured demand, rather than an automatic performance boost.

For existing Graviton3 workloads, compare application-level throughput and tail latency under representative load before using AWS’s performance claim in capacity estimates. The practical sizing question is which resource limits the application—not which family-level maximum looks largest.