3 ms·

Also just to add a tiny bit to this wealth of information: I just recently did an experiment on the difference between non-nitro and nitro-enabled (m4.xlarge v

Also just to add a tiny bit to this wealth of information: I just recently did an experiment on the difference between non-nitro and nitro-enabled (m4.xlarge vs. m5.xlarge) instances, in a production-ish trendy setup -- Ceph running on Kubernetes (managed by Rook), leveraged to run postgres and pgbench. The increase in performance was around +45% TPS, just from switching to the nitro enabled instance. The absolute amount of TPS wasn't high because the setup was untuned but simply switching created quite the difference. On top of all that, the Nitro instance was actually just slightly cheaper than the non-nitro instance. AWS hit it out of park in the making -- they've been working on it since 2014 supposedly and they certainly built something worth replicating.

tiernano 4y ago
just playing devil's advocate, that 45% is a little skewed though... the M4 instance was a "Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 Haswell processor" (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/the-new-m4-instance-type-bonus-price-reduction-on-m3-c4/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/the-new-m4-instance-type-bo...) and the M5 is a "Custom Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8175M series processors running at 2.5 GHz" (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/m5-the-next-generation-of-general-purpose-ec2-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/m5-the-next-generation-of-g...). so, you are jumping 2 generations from E5v3 to Gen 1 SP processors, plus going to custom processors for AWS (higher and more sustained turbo). I do agree that Nitro is a big change (less overhead for the hypervisor, faster IO and Networking, etc) but I wonder what the perf diff is just CPU upgrades...
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  Hey thanks for the note -- that's a good confounding factor I didn't take into account. > Based on Custom Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8175M series processors running at 2.5 GHz, the M5 instances are designed for highly demanding workloads and will deliver 14% better price/performance than the M4 instances on a per-core basis. If we take AWS at their word here, all other things equal 30% is a pretty decent result (with absolutely no tuning) -- I'll update the post with this caveat! All together though, this does still contribute to the point that Nitro is well worth the money.

tiernano 4y ago

just playing devil's advocate, that 45% is a little skewed though... the M4 instance was a "Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 Haswell processor" (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/the-new-m4-instance-type-bonus-price-reduction-on-m3-c4/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/the-new-m4-instance-type-bo...) and the M5 is a "Custom Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8175M series processors running at 2.5 GHz" (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/m5-the-next-generation-of-general-purpose-ec2-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/m5-the-next-generation-of-g...). so, you are jumping 2 generations from E5v3 to Gen 1 SP processors, plus going to custom processors for AWS (higher and more sustained turbo). I do agree that Nitro is a big change (less overhead for the hypervisor, faster IO and Networking, etc) but I wonder what the perf diff is just CPU upgrades...

hardwaresofton 4y ago
Hey thanks for the note -- that's a good confounding factor I didn't take into account. > Based on Custom Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8175M series processors running at 2.5 GHz, the M5 instances are designed for highly demanding workloads and will deliver 14% better price/performance than the M4 instances on a per-core basis. If we take AWS at their word here, all other things equal 30% is a pretty decent result (with absolutely no tuning) -- I'll update the post with this caveat! All together though, this does still contribute to the point that Nitro is well worth the money.