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Some of this is fairly well known if you happen to be quite familiar with Xen. If your use case is "I don't want to understand Xen", then fine, just use AWS an

Some of this is fairly well known if you happen to be quite familiar with Xen. If your use case is "I don't want to understand Xen", then fine, just use AWS and pick the newest instances, they're usually the best. AWS does have some words about PV vs HVM here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/virtualization_types.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/virtualiz... But really, they don't say much and that's fine. If you just want to run stuff, you probably don't need to understand the deep details of Xen or PV drivers or whatever; the cpu speed, memory, and "disk io"/"cpu credits" they document quite well will be what matters significantly more. If you are at the scale of netflix, then it does make sense to figure out an extra several percent disk performance. > I would totally care more about replacing stuff if I knew ... instead of "I have no clue what if anything is different They almost always have blog posts accompanying each new instance launch which roughly outline the performance improvements and reasons that instance type is cool vs previous ones, even if they don't go into the depth of virtualization differences so often (which again, usually doesn't matter! for nitro, the C5 blog did talk about the visualization stuff in depth https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-compute-intensive-c5-instances-for-amazon-ec2/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-compute-inten...)

saurik 9y ago
I knew about PV vs. HVM, as that is documented. However, there is a ton of nuance in this article about every instance type and specific changes to what parts of the system are virtualized (and in particular stuff with EBS, which I stress heavily). I guess you are saying that people need to essentially find all of the old blog posts from AWS to figure out any of this, but why isn't it just documented? I clearly am someone who cares a lot about these things, or I wouldn't have posted the question I did: but Amazon's instances are essentially just black boxes. I am hoping that there is somewhere in the documentation that I don't know about that just shows the differences between all of these instance types in a few centralized pages.

saurik 9y ago

I knew about PV vs. HVM, as that is documented. However, there is a ton of nuance in this article about every instance type and specific changes to what parts of the system are virtualized (and in particular stuff with EBS, which I stress heavily). I guess you are saying that people need to essentially find all of the old blog posts from AWS to figure out any of this, but why isn't it just documented? I clearly am someone who cares a lot about these things, or I wouldn't have posted the question I did: but Amazon's instances are essentially just black boxes. I am hoping that there is somewhere in the documentation that I don't know about that just shows the differences between all of these instance types in a few centralized pages.