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That particular AWS forum post doesn't support your argument. Especially when Matt the AWS rep specifically acknowledged in that very thread that the update AWS

That particular AWS forum post doesn't support your argument. Especially when Matt the AWS rep specifically acknowledged in that very thread that the update AWS had applied had had an effect on performance. It matters not what the workload was running on before or accusations of laziness, the key takeaway from that post was that there was an impact on performance caused by the Meltdown/Spectre mitigations. The fact another commenter barged into the thread with an unrelated issue simply shows that AWS forum operates within the Law of Forums (which states all threads are to be cross pollinated with unrelated issues from at least one other user). EDIT: I should say that if this fellow is the only affected user from all the computer users of the world, then the mitigations applied can be called successful. That seems unlikely :-)

acdha 9y ago
I think you missed my point, which was simply that any service which you care about should be running on n > 1 servers and with at least enough capacity planning so that a small percentage change in workload doesn't cause user-visible failures. That's especially true in an environment like EC2 where hosts fail and noisy neighbors can cause service degradation. In this case, the thread made it clear that the real problem was that they didn't have a good deployment story — notice how the original poster was mentioning needing to move everything to an m3.medium manually? I would be quite surprised if they haven't had other problems in the past (e.g. what happens when a system update kicks off if that server is already running at 90+% utilization? or when they get more users and/or the existing users start doing slightly more) but hadn't wanted to deal with the hassle of migrating.