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> AWS Graviton2-based EC2 Instances make up 14% of the installed base within AWS > 49% of AWS EC2 instance additions in 2020 are based on Graviton2 Surprised
by klelatti 6y ago
> AWS Graviton2-based EC2 Instances make up 14% of the installed base within AWS
> 49% of AWS EC2 instance additions in 2020 are based on Graviton2
Surprised at this level of Graviton2 adoption in AWS at this stage. Any clues as to who is using these instances?
Edit: Presumably Intel's shrinking Q1 2021 Data Center revenues are partly as a result of this.
- speedgoose 6y agoAWS itself is probably the main user I would guess. So you use them indirectly through AWS' vendor lock APIs.
- TheGuyWhoCodes 6y agoRDS support Graviton2 as the instance type, maybe people with supported versions just migrated.
- eqvinox 6y ago"instance additions" also doesn't take instance size/performance into account. If ARM-based instances are overall smaller, that'd allow more of them, distorting the numbers... Percentage of compute power would be cool to know here.
- somethingwitty1 6y agoThere have been a bunch of higher-profile, "we moved to Graviton2 and cut costs". Twitter, for example, migrated: https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/twitter-selects-aws-and-graviton-arm-instances-to-serve-timelines/ https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/twitter-selects-aws-and...
- neuronexmachina 6y agoAlso Netflix, although I don't think they've said what portion of their instances they've migrated: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/customers/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/customers/
- KuiN 6y agoThey're the cheapest EC2 instance type, so they're very attractive to small scale deployments like side projects, personal sites etc. (basically anything that can run on one or two small nodes) where budget is a major concern. The t4g.micro is in the free tier as well, so that'll help. I host a few very low traffic sites & I'm in the process of switching from a basic DO Droplet to a pair of low-end Gravitons. Will save me money and give better peak performance for my workloads.
- klelatti 6y agoMaybe, but it would take a _lot_ of people moving small deployments (where by definition the savings would be small especially relative to the fixed costs of getting to work on Arm) in a relatively short space of time to have this impact - so I'm sceptical (and if it is then it must be very easy to move to Arm - which I'm also sceptical of). More likely some very big customers (peer comment mentions Twitter) moving to Graviton2 for cost savings.
- tyingq 6y agoGraviton might be the top and/or default choice in their management console when you create an EC2 instance. That would swing things pretty quickly for all the free tier folks. Edit: Nope, not yet, but close..you still have to change the radio button: https://imgur.com/a/W0Sweyy https://imgur.com/a/W0Sweyy
- ac29 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ksec 6y ago>Presumably Intel's shrinking Q1 2021 Data Center revenues are partly as a result of this. It was both AMD and ARM. There are many work loads that G2 offer immediate cost / performance advantage. AWS charges per vCPU, which is one thread on Intel/AMD and one Core on ARM. So you get ~30% performance improvement along with a ~30% lower cost for using ARM Graviton Series. Most of them have reported a total of 50% reduction in cost. For those that have hundreds if not thousands of EC2 running which fits that workload advantage, this is too much saving to pass on. There are many SaaS running on EC2 that has mentioned their success on twitter and various other places. Worth pointing out, this is with Amazon installing as many as they get from TSMC. A few months ago on HN I wrote [1] about how half of the Intel DC market will be gone in a few years time. Edit: Another point worth mentioning, this is as much of a threat to Medium and Smaller Size Cloud like Linode and DO where they dont have access to ARM (Yet). And even when they get it Amazon have the cost advantage of building their own instead of buying from a company ( Ampere ). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25808856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25808856
- qzw 6y agoLinode and DO could always offer a physical x86 core instead of a virtual SMT core. It would cut into margins somewhat, but maybe Intel and AMD would be more willing to discount when they have to play defense. I think one problem for the x86 guys is that because the demand for chips far exceeds supply, they’re still doing “fine” or even “well” right now. So the threat from ARM may still be perceived on mostly an intellectual level instead of provoking the necessary visceral survival response.
- klelatti 6y agoI think it's unlikely that anyone at Intel thinks -20% Q1 datacenter revenue YOY is doing well. The question is what options do they have to deal with this?
- baybal2 6y agoI believe Intel couldn't have imagined with what ease their biggest customers can turn into their biggest competitors overnight. Even a decade ago that would've been unthinkable, but today, making a cookiecutter SoC is relatively easy because nearly everything can be taken off the shelf. Production costs though.... sub-10nm mask set costs completely rule out anything resembling a startup competing in this area. I think 65nm was the last golden opportunity to jump on the departing train. It was still posible to ship a cookie cutter chip under $1m, now... no way. Now, Semi industry is basically Airbus vs. Boeing.
- klelatti 6y agoAgreed .. except weren't Ampere (2017) and Nuvia (2019) startups?
- floatboth 6y agoAmpere kinda was an acquisition of Applied Micro, but its internal X-Gene uarch was dropped into the trash very quickly in favor of Arm Neoverse…
- baybal2 6y agoAmpere basically started as a re-labeled XGene from Applied Micro which started back in 40nm days. And they came with quite some cash to start with: their backer is Carlyle Group, the biggest LBO shop in the world. Nuvia basically never intended to really compete Intel, or AMD heads on. Their $30m stash would've been just enough for a single "leap of faith" tapeout on a generation old node, and a year of life support after. They were aiming for a quick sell from the start too.
- klelatti 6y agoDepends on your definition of startup I guess. Certainly seems to be enough capital available. I definitely don't agree with premise that it's now Boeing vs Airbus now (certainly less so than it was a few years ago when x86 was the only game in town).
- 6y ago
- vosper 6y agoThe company I work for has migrated hundreds of heavily-utilised Elasticsearch and Storm nodes to Graviton. No performance issues, pure cost saving. We’re working on the rest of our systems now. We’re going to save hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next few years.
- phamilton 6y agoWe haven't migrated yet but we expect to do some benchmarking this quarter for Aurora. For EC2 we run on spot and spot c5.metal are cheaper per vcpu than c6g.metal, so we haven't prio'd benchmarking our compute loads.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- carlosf 6y agoAWS's own offerings such as RDS and internal control plane stuff are very likely using ARM behind the sheets. I have evaluated going ARM, but I ended up deciding the savings were not worth it. Not only you need to mantain 2 archs simultaneously for some time, but porting some stuff to ARM, (e.g. Python) can be a pain in the ass. Finally, my devs work in AMD64 and that would be another source for "why does this work in dev but not prod".
- StreamBright 6y agoI know many users. Basically any non-x86 workload that cost sensitive can benefit from moving to arm instances. Database instances are good candidates, big data workloads as well.
- sleepy_keita 6y agoI wouldn't be surprised if AWS is using Graviton2 pretty heavily for internal processes as well, stuff like control planes for the major services like S3, SQS, SNS, etc...