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I wonder, as an AWS customer, what's the advantage of an ARM instance over a more traditional AMD64 one?
by dsign 7y ago
I wonder, as an AWS customer, what's the advantage of an ARM instance over a more traditional AMD64 one?
- whb07 7y agoWouldn’t a security aspect fall in line here as well? Most of the specter and other attacks are for amd architecture. I could be off base, would like to know an experts opinion as well.
- whalesalad 7y agoSpectre has been found to exist on ARM as well.
- phamilton 7y agoDoes ARM specify speculative execution? I would have guessed that's an implementation detail of Qualcomm or Marvell or Nvidia's implementation of ARM.
- dchest 7y agoYes, Arm designs not only instruction set, but also processors, which mentioned vendors then put into their SoCs or base their modified designs on. Here's a list of affected processors: https://developer.arm.com/support/arm-security-updates/speculative-processor-vulnerability https://developer.arm.com/support/arm-security-updates/specu...
- cbg0 7y agoAccording to AWS marketing: 20% lower cost and up to 40% higher performance over Amazon EC2 M5 instances, based on internal testing of workloads.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- derision 7y ago*assuming your programs can be ported to ARM
- takeda 7y agoSince those are your programs you have source code, so yes, you can port them to ARM. The actual question is whether you want to put that effort or not. You'll have to decide if the savings through instance are worth it or not.
- colechristensen 7y agoIf you're not in the business of writing C, whatever you're doing will most likely just work these days.
- Aaronstotle 7y agoI'm curious as well, I wonder if they'll be cheaper compared to AMD64. Would be nice to build a cheap sandbox environment with a bunch of these machines.
- tracer4201 7y agoIf I was to adopt these ARM instances in production, for my services running on the JVM, I suppose I need to ensure things can actually build, integration test it all together, load test it, and review performance metrics. Then I also need to ensure that all the tooling I use (for example - agents running on the box, other processes decoupled from my service, etc) are all working as expected without functional or performance regressions. I’m actually not sure what else needs to be looked at... but this is all new work without new value if I look at it on its own. Hard to justify to my CIO. I don’t know what the pricing model is but I wouldn’t even think of adopting this unless there’s a significant price benefit, allowing me to run on much cheaper hardware. Even then, it only makes sense to me if you have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of hosts provisioned where that price delta really adds up to savings. This is all conjecture - I’ve never done a migration like this.
- jedberg 7y agoPresumably you wouldn’t migrate to these unless you had a good reason. But it might make sense to build new applications on ARM.
- inlined 7y agoThen don’t you worry that there’s only one real ARM offering and you’d be locked in lest you do the same kind of analyses for porting back to x86/x64?
- PaulHoule 7y agoSome software will run on ARM with very little work. (If you care about performance it might be a little more work!) Some will involve one hell of a fight with your compiler, libraries, build tools, etc. AMZN itself is a good early adopter for a new architecture since they have so many services such as S3, SQS, where they have huge fleets of machines running a single set of programs, so the payback time for the port should be low.
- bmurphy1976 7y agoWe use some arm instances for services that need multiple servers for redundancy purposes but are otherwise low overhead/usage. The cost savings are small but they add up over time.