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EC2 Instances Powered by Arm-Based AWS Graviton Processors
- brad0 8y agoVery exciting! I’m curious what type of workloads these will be used for. Will this be much cheaper than Intel instances?
- orliesaurus 8y agoComparing the large instance (16vCores, 32gib ram) to anything else "large" in N.Virginia, the price seems more affordable than what was purchase-able until now
- orliesaurus 8y agoAmazon making their own CPUs? Damn. Looks like if you run Python or other scripted languages you can simply port your code over...Nice!
- tw04 8y agoThey acquired Annapurna Labs back in 2015 - I'm sure this is based on their work, they (Annapurna) were already building chips for Synology prior to the acquisition. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapurna_Labs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapurna_Labs
- jchw 8y agoCertainly scripted languages run fine on ARM Linux, however there are some caveats worth mentioning. ARM JIT compilers for some platforms and languages may be not as mature or performant as their x86 counterparts since they haven't been battletested as much in the server landscape. Also, if you are using C extensions that don't compile to ARM, obviously that is going to affect you. And finally, if any part of your CI is building images containing native code (even if all of your code is say, Python,) you are going to need to duplicate that process for ARM, possibly requiring some retooling of your build system. I am very curious to see how it plays out. I've been waiting for a cloud ARM offering from a major provider for a while now (there have been some smaller but notable players like Scaleway, but demand seemed to always outrun supply, and I couldn't get VMs running near me in America.)
- dmos62 8y agoI use an ARM laptop for travel. I've had a lot of problems with running Python code. Mostly data-science related. A lot of recompilation is required, which is a hassle. Also, sometimes you'll be constrained in what libraries you can use, because some of them simply don't work on ARM, due to ARM specific bugs. NUMBA is one that caused a lot of headache, but I think they got it fixed since.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoWhich one? I'm in the market for a super cheap one!
- dmos62 8y agoAsus C201P. ~180 euros. Very durable, battery lasts for 10 hours easy, more if only programming. It's preinstalled with ChromeOS. Installing Linux took some tinkering; there are some blog posts around that were very helpful.
- heywire 8y agoYou might also look at the Pinebook, 11" for $99. I'm considering one also.
- RKearney 8y agoYes, that’s exactly what the linked article mentions > If your application is written in a scripting language, > odds are that you can simply move it over to an A1 instance > and run it as-is. If your application compiles down to > native code, you will need to rebuild it on an A1 instance.
- exikyut 8y agoHeh, "rebuild it _on_" They're clearly putting a hundred-mile moat between them and cross-compilation from the start :D I wonder what their support stance will be when confronted with customer cross-compile scenarios.
- mathw 8y agoMight just be "figure it out for yourself". I doubt it's that hard if you're using a language with a reasonable cross-compile toolchain. That will probably influence choice of technology for new things aimed at this kind of performance envelope. No doubt a lot of existing software will be left out by cross-compilation being too much of a pain.
- skyely 8y agoI can confirm that cross-compiling for aarch64 should work without hiccups.
- anonfunction 8y agoGolang has really nice cross compilation features, it's as easy as setting two environment variables `GOOS` and `GOARCH` when building.
- jon_masters 8y agoIf you use a modern gitops CI/CD type workflow building containers automatically then you don't need to worry about the manual building part either - this can be done cleanly with automation
- mcbain 8y ago
- bjackman 8y agoThe actual CPU core designs are licensed from Arm (another commenter said they're Cortex A72s).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hpbd 8y agoProperly written C is portable (and much faster than Python)
- twtw 8y agoDepending on how you define "properly written." It was easy to write seemingly proper code that assumed TSO and worked for x86 but does not work on architectures with weak memory consistency.
- gok 8y agoTrue, but outside of memory ordering, x86_64 and ARM64 are probably among the easiest to port between. Endianness, alignment and type sizes are the same, for example. Plus a lot of code already has been ported to both.
- StillBored 8y agoCode that assumes TSO is likely broken on x86 as well. The use of the volatile keyword doesn't really change that in any meaningful way either, given that part of the language is a bit under-specified. Basically, C compilers are free to do a lot of non-obvious optimizations which can reorder around volatile accesses. Put another way, there isn't anything in the base C spec which can provide a guaranteed memory ordering barrier, which is why you absolutely have to depend on 3rd party specifications to get those guarantees. For example, if a program is using pthreads or openMP, their synchronization primitives must be used as well to assure portability. That isn't to say that given a particular piece of code and compiler/switches/version the resulting program is wrong, just that its quite possible changing compilers/flags may result in "incorrect" code generation.
- kerpele 8y agoIt'll be interesting to benchmark these against existing instance types. Also, there hasn't really been anything in AWS for low sustained load but these seem to fit the bill perfectly.
- douglasfshearer 8y agoRick Branson ran a benchmark with Phoronix. a1 is ~2/3 of the cost/performance of a5. [0] [0] https://twitter.com/rbranson/status/1067304265696202752 https://twitter.com/rbranson/status/1067304265696202752
- talawahdotnet 8y agoYea, I think the fact that it even has a medium instance type is the biggest win for apps that don't need a lot of RAM. c5 and m5 start at large with 4GB/8GB respectively. To me the most interesting thing will be comparing against t3, which gives you a surprising bang for your buck in scale out workloads, even when you factor in the fractional baseline credit allocation.
- talawahdotnet 8y agoVery interesting. Looking forward to benchmarking these for NodeJS API workloads. Does anybody with experience running node on ARM have any advice/warnings?
- jon_masters 8y agoIt all just works well. I've been actually running Node on these instances for a while and it's awesome.
- hamandcheese 8y agoOn demand pricing starts at roughly $20/month. When they said low cost I was hoping for something in the ~$5 range.
- mcrute 8y agoThe a1.medium 12-month reserved cost is $151 which is about $12.60 a month.
- TheDong 8y agot3.nano instances already start at about ~$4 (+ ebs and network). Their lightsail alternative pricing model for ec2 instances also has $3.50 and $5 instances [0]. [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/
- teraflop 8y agoSpot instances are about $3.50 a month, for what it's worth.
- techdragon 8y agoI wonder how long the spot price will remain this low. It does fluctuate after all.
- floatboth 8y agoOoh. Thanks for reminding me about spot. That's way better than the on-demand price. (Still 1/4 the cores of the Scaleway offering though.)
- luckylittle 8y agoAgree, this is still quite expensive.
- etaioinshrdlu 8y agoIt seems like a better value than a t2 instance because it's not a burstable core. The network performance is probably much better on this instance type as well.
- koolba 8y agoDoes vCPU on the chart refer to a physical ARM core and any clue how they stack up against a modern x86-64 core? If they’re significantly cheaper to run at similar perf this is an easy win for arch agnostic things like bastion servers or purely interpreted scripting languages.
- _msw_ 8y agoHello from the EC2 engineering team! A vCPU on an A1 instance is a physical Arm core. There is no SMT (multi-threading) on A1 instances. In my experience on the platform, the performance is quite good for traditional cloud applications that are built on open source software, especially given the price. Since the Arm architecture is quite different than x86, we always recommend testing the performance with your own applications. There's really no substitute for that.
- koolba 8y agoThanks for the direct response! Are A1 instances supported as hosts for ECS clusters?
- bbgm 8y agoYes
- TheDong 8y agoThe docker image they release for the on-host agent [0] doesn't seem to have an arm tag. That seems to point towards it being unlikely. I'll also point out that most docker images you build/run today are x86 and so won't run on arm machines anyway. [0]: https://hub.docker.com/r/amazon/amazon-ecs-agent/ https://hub.docker.com/r/amazon/amazon-ecs-agent/
- justincormack 8y agoMost of the official Docker images are now multi arch. We have been using Packet.net to build the arm images. But there are many images that are not and some registries don’t support multi arch even.
- jchw 8y agoVery cool. As others point out, it does seem a bit expensive, but I do find it impressive that AWS has added AMD and ARM offerings in such a short period. Forgetting the idea of using ARM servers purely for the potential cost savings, I feel this could be a boon to those wanting to run ARM CI builds on actual hardware instead of Qemu.
- ac29 8y agoAny idea what ARM cores these are based on? A5x? A7x? A76 would be pretty interesting...
- sidereal 8y agoLooks like A72. Here's the cpuinfo: processor : 0 BogoMIPS : 166.66 Features : fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 cpuid CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 8 CPU variant : 0x0 CPU part : 0xd08 CPU revision : 3
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ac29 8y agoToo bad, A72 is the sort of thing found in $49 SBC's these days. For the price, it would have been nice to see at least A73, but at least its not an A53.
- baybal2 8y agoJeff has to make take his cut from somewhere after all
- wmf 8y agoA73 isn't for servers and I don't see any server/embedded SoCs with A75 yet, so Amazon isn't exactly behind.
- ac29 8y agoTrue, most server ARM processors that come to mind are custom (or at least semi-custom): Ampere, Centriq, ThunderX2. Trying to map them to A72/73/75/76 is perhaps short sighted since those are primarily smartphone cores - we'll have to wait and see how they perform in real world tests.
- floatboth 8y ago> at least its not an A53 Indeed. A72 is like the minimum viable core :) It's no eMAG or ThunderX2, but it's kinda comparable to the original ThunderX.
- dis-sys 8y agoCan't wait to see some specs and benchmarks of this new ARM processor! Best AWS news for me in 2018.
- baybal2 8y agoI see, Mr. Bezos finally got concerned by hardware makers turning AWS into their milking cow. Quite a smart move.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fargo 8y agoI was expecting a firearm based processor
- azinman2 8y agoAmazon-made CPUs now available in EC2 instances? I hope someone at Intel is paying attention....
- baybal2 8y agoSurely they do, all kinds of "cloud" companies were their favourite milking cows in the last decade. I believe Amazon's primary motivation for going as far as buying an own chip company was to, at least, send Intel a signal "would you lower the price tag?" That "cloud" industry is approaching the point of market being fully served, and everybody starting to focus on price. Amazon surely wants to be at least prepared for that, if not having a plan to undercut everybody early on ARM based hosting.
- kelp 8y agoFrom the perspective of capabilities, I think you’re right, the market is nearly fully served. From usability, I think we still have a long ways to go.
- gtirloni 8y agoThis is great news for ARM in general. Hopefully they can offer massive thread count in the future, even if with less powerful cores.
- tanilama 8y agoWow...this is actually huge. Finally a big player for ARM based server!
- tambourine_man 8y agoDoes ARM feature hardware assisted virtualization? Like Intel VT instructions? I’m thinking incredibly cheap ARM instances in the future.
- jon_masters 8y agoYes, Arm does feature hardware virt and it works similarly to other architectures
- nl 8y agoAmazon shipping their own CPUs (which are only available on their cloud) and Google shipping their own TPUs (which are only available on their cloud). TPUs are already a better deal than GPUs for training many models. These CPUs don't seem to have a similar niche yet, but who knows what else they have ready to switch on. The next ten years are going to be really interesting in the hardware space.
- StillBored 8y agoWell its true about the TPU's, but you can find similar A72 based servers from other vendors if you try hard enough... https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/hisilicon/hi16xx/hi1616 https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/hisilicon/hi16xx/hi1616 The ThunderX2 based machines aren't A72's but a probably easier to source and are basically in the same conceptual ballpark.
- nl 8y agoSure, they are Arm cores, but who knows what else they have on them. Arm has a bunch of extensions[1][2] which would be really useful on these in some circumstances. And that is ignoring the "custom silicon" that Amazon claims to have. [1] https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/machine-learning/arm-ml-processor https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/machine-learning... [2] https://www.androidauthority.com/arm-project-trillium-842770/ https://www.androidauthority.com/arm-project-trillium-842770...
- tromp 8y ago"we’ve worked with them to build and release two generations of ASICs (chips, not shoes)"
- cntlzw 8y agoFor someone who doesn't know much about ARM vs Intel/AMD. What is the use case here? If both run Linux what is the difference?
- lgbr 8y agoAt the current point in time, this is probably limited to ARM-specific workloads (such as if I need to run ARM binaries, or generate ARM binaries without the hassle of cross-compiling). The long term, however, is where things start to get interesting. I suspect that by the second generation we're going to see ARM servers able to deliver a better price-per-core (and perhaps therefore price for computing performance) than the x86 alternatives. This will be particularly beneficial for applications which require a lot of CPU power and are highly parallelizable. Picture a workload that can take advantage of 64 cores, with ARM you can get this many cores for a lot less cost than x86.
- rbranson 8y agoThese instances already deliver better cost efficiency. The a1 instances are within 5% of the performance of similar c5 instances, but are 40% (!!!) cheaper.
- turblety 8y agoDo hosting companies no longer give you the speed of a processing core? I couldn't find anywhere that explains how fast 1 of the ARM cores go? Is it 1ghz or 100mhz? Seems like that would be quite important. Seems like 1vCPU is a bit of an arbitary figure. That could be 1 vCPU that goes at 4ghz but then 2 vCPU's that only go at 1ghz. I feel like there's information missing.
- manojlds 8y agoDetails are there in appropriate pages. > C5 instances feature the Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series (Skylake-SP) processor with a sustained all core Turbo CPU clock speed of up to 3.4GHz, and single core turbo up to 3.5 GHz using Intel Turbo Boost Technology. C5 instances offer higher memory to vCPU ratio and deliver 25% improvement in price/performance compared to C4 instances, with certain applications delivering greater than 50% improvement. C5 instances provide support for the new Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) instruction set, offering up to 2x the FLOPS per core per cycle compared to the previous generation C4 instances. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/c5/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/c5/ Haven't looked up details for the new stuff yet, might take some time to be up.
- cbzoiav 8y agoBut clock speed doesn't really mean anything these days either. 1Ghz is just as arbitrary - the instruction rate through two CPUs at the same clock rate can vary massively. So a vCPU is an arbitrary unit but as each is equivalent then they can be benchmarked for the relevant workload.
- BeeOnRope 8y agovCPUs are not at all equivalent across instance types! One vCPU is a single hardware thread on an actual core (ie, two vCPUs is a full core of whatever the underlying machine is if it is an SMT2 core). So the power of a vCPU is quite different across different hardware types. You might be thinking of ECU (EC2 compute unit), which are intended to be comparable across hardware and are normalized to some old 1.7 GHz CPU that I guess was common in the early days of EC2. Amazon doesn't promote the ECU rating for instance types much, but it's still available if you look.
- jayonsoftware 8y ago2 GB / 1 vCPU about $20. On DO you can get 4 GB / 2 vCPUs plus 80 GB storage and 4 TB on Transfer for $20. (Same with linode.com, upcloud.com)
- wlll 8y agoI remember once someone saying something along the lines of (and I'm paraphrasing) "Amazon aren't the cheapest retailer out there, but they want you to believe they are". It's a similar situation with AWS. They're not /cheap,/ and they're not /cheaper/ than a lot of alternatives. The advantage of AWS is flexibility and depth of tooling, not price, though a lot of people are under the general impression that "it's cheaper on AWS".
- pwaai 8y agoTHIS. I gound out the hard way. Im back on linode. You realize now the power of branding, cult personality, marketing, get foreign cops to beat foreign workers at warehouse....sure is hel--i shit you not my book atrived from Amazon.ca
- acdha 8y ago“It's cheaper on AWS” really depends on where you're starting from, too. If you actually need more than, say, a bare Linux box it's usually hard to even start collecting the staff time + costs for the equivalent enterprise environment with network infrastructure, monitoring, access management and audit logging, the various fault-tolerance / recovery options, etc. It requires care to do a comparison which actually measures the subset of features which you use — I've seen the other side of that where someone justified dropping a ton of cash on a particular option based on a specific feature but, jumping ahead a few years, never ended up using that due to performance/stability/security issues.
- 013a 8y agoIn the same keynote this was announced, they said that one of their regions has reached nearly 5 Pbps of inter-AZ network capacity. They also poked at Google for using phrasing like "regions usually have independent cooling and power control planes". They clarified a common misconception: Regions aren't single datacenters, nor are AZs single data centers, and at least one of their AZs (probably a us-east-1 AZ) has fourteen datacenters. If you want the Cheapest, go to DigitalOcean. AWS is engineering the Best. Why HN has this obsession with quibbling over a couple dollars while hosting their hobby projects on the same cloud provider that Epic Games and Netflix pay hundreds of millions of dollars to for their massive workloads, I'll have no idea. It's not made for you. Amazon can get on stage and throw valid infrastructure resiliency complaints at Google. They can't do the same thing against DigitalOcean or Linode, because that'd be like Usain Bolt making fun of a toddler's quarter mile time.
- imaginenore 8y agoThese prices are nuts. 4 cores with 8GB RAM is $72/month. That's without any storage.
- dwyerm 8y agoI'm still curious what the real use-cases are going to be for these platforms. I think many people see "ARM in AWS" and think they're going to get an array of super-inexpensive Raspberry Pies with Amazon's network, power, storage and APIs behind them. But Amazon doesn't appear to be aiming for those users with this product. T3s are probably a faster and cheaper option for the "RPi in the cloud" use-case. I suspect the real users of this platform are going to be using them for development and testing for mobile platforms.
- rbranson 8y agoWe run an auto-scaled pool of C5 instances that host stateless containerized services. T* instances don’t make sense since we run them pretty warm all the time. If we need less capacity, we scale down. The appeal for this type of workload is purely compute per dollar spent. They are substantially cheaper than the x86 options.
- Sohcahtoa82 8y ago> T3s are probably a faster and cheaper option for the "RPi in the cloud" use-case. Cheaper? Yes. Faster? Only in bursts. The advantage of the A1 instances is you get a full CPU core that you can run at 100% usage 24/7 for ~$18/month. A t3.small is ~$15/month, but you can only use the CPU at 100% for a fraction of the time. If you're frequently pegging the CPU and so a T3 doesn't work for you, your cheapest option is a C5 which runs ~$61/month. A1 fits right in between the two needs.
- blasdel 8y agoA1 is launched under ARM's new "Neoverse" branding that might help to distinguish this class of products from Raspberry Pi expectations: https://www.arm.com/company/news/2018/10/announcing-arm-neoverse https://www.arm.com/company/news/2018/10/announcing-arm-neov...
- pyabo 8y agoDo you Google Employees think that NSA isn't watching what we do? Mmm, it looks like China is evil so they can't do what USA can