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GCP, AWS, and Azure ARM-based server performance comparison
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoI wish Oracle Cloud was also included. The 24 GB, 4 core ARM vps you can get for free is a really nice way to try out ARM for individual developers.
- yandie 4y agoOnly if you can pass their fraud detection! I tried signing up under various personal and business credit cards without any success!
- qwytw 4y agoDo you need a car to sign up for the free tier? I can't recall if they asked for one on initial registration but I had to add a card and went through the fraud detection bs (basically waiting for close to a week to be approved) when I had to upgrade to the paid tier.
- Thaxll 4y agoPerformance is terrible though.
- wmf 4y agoIs Oracle performance really worse than GCE or Azure? It's the same processor.
- ksec 4y agoI remember Oracle used to provide the free instances and resources using older ARM chip. But a quick search now this no longer seems to be the case.
- attentive 4y agoWhat specifically? - in my benchmarking oci ARM cpu was faster than aws graviton2. That was before graviton3 came out so I didn't test it.
- Thaxll 4y agoThe performance is equivalent to an Intel quad core from 2013.
- qwytw 4y agoIt's still a magnitude or two better than the free tiers on AWS/GCP/Azure and you get 10 TB of free traffic which alone would be $100-200 on AWS
- Havoc 4y agoBusy playing with this at the moment (trying a k8s)...their availability is quite patchy. Struggling to get 4x ARMs even created let alone reliably created via terraform.
- londons_explore 4y agoAnd how does that same benchmark run on an apple M1 chip?
- smoldesu 4y agoProbably not all that favorably, considering that MacOS (moreover, XNU and APFS) aren't really optimized for server use. Hell, to my knowledge most of the networking drivers are quite old if not poached wholesale from early FreeBSD distributions. Running it on Asahi might tell a different story, but it's almost completely irrelevant considering how painful it is provisioning Macs as opposed to Graviton instances.
- whalesalad 4y agoare u srs
- smoldesu 4y agoHave you seen Monterey benchmarks when compared to identical Linux hardware? Performance for server applications and IO-constrained operations favor Linux consistently.
- rovr138 4y agoI think the whole point is that the hardware isn’t the same.
- whalesalad 4y agowould rly love to see this if you don't mind sharing a link
- qwytw 4y agoM1/2 will probably be ahead significantly per core especially price/performance wise. But yeah, entirely different products, even if it might be worth it on paper, stacking stacking 10 mac minis is not a real alternative to something like Altra Q80-30 even though it might be a bit cheaper. Would be cool if Apple reintroduced Xserve. Extremely unlikely, though, considering that server margin are way to low for Apple to even consider and they really can't bet that their CPUs will be ahead of everyone else indefinitely.
- tanelpoder 4y agoWas hoping to see the results, but the images were all blurry dummy placeholders (some sort of lazy loading for images?). The images had a text on "click here for preview", but when I clicked it, nothing happened (I have ad-blockers, maybe that's why some JS code was disabled). But what the heck, this is not how wepages should work - click here to "unblur" the image? Why add such an extra step? To save bandwidth cost?
- hardwaresofton 4y agoWeird the images worked for me... Maybe try reader mode if you're using FF? Re-uploaded just in case it doesn't work: https://imgur.com/a/QSF2mnh https://imgur.com/a/QSF2mnh
- tanelpoder 4y agoGood idea, thanks - the reader mode in Safari worked ok.
- magicalhippo 4y agoHad to allow some javascripts from a third-party site[1] in uBlock Matrix to get the images to show properly. So yeah, JS at it again... [1]: apisix-website-static.apiseven.com
- waynesonfire 4y agogatta have the means to measure that engagement
- jjzhiyuan 4y agoAFIK, that’s because the CDN provides the ability to make the original images as WEBP. I will let maintainers know this case, may I know which browser you’re using?
- Jenk 4y agothis is a feature of asynchronously loading the "heavy" images to unimpede the loading of the text and markup. The "click to unblur" is because it failed to automatically load the image, and as a fallback uses a CTA (i.e., an event triggered by the user explicitly) to reattempt to load the images. CTAs have a higher privilege for fetching content.
- adduc 4y agoThe benchmarks appear to show AWS wins by a considerable margin in all tests, and is cheaper at all quoted price points, but is hardly above Azure in the cost performance table. This appears to be due to including Azure's reserved pricing but continuing to use AWS and GCP's on-demand pricing. This is misleading, as both GCP and AWS offer discounts for yearly commitments.
- tbillington 4y agoCurious how they would compare to a non-cloud option https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-rx https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-rx.
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
- tbillington 4y agoI'm quite jealous of their closet then :) For anyone curious here's a tour of one of their data centers https://youtu.be/5eo8nz_niiM?t=813 https://youtu.be/5eo8nz_niiM?t=813.
- ignoramous 4y agoOnce true for Google, as well ;)
- speedgoose 4y agoAnd Microsoft azure today in smaller zones.
- the_duke 4y agoThat's complete nonsense, Hetzner has large data centers.
- wmf 4y ago
- perryizgr8 4y agoIs there any advantage to running an ARM instance in the cloud, as opposed to a x64 one?
- neonsunset 4y agoIt comes down to resulting cost and resources required to reach SLOs of your services. Major factors for such are the quality of support for arm64 by your workloads and specific optimizations available for such (running code that has AVX512 optimizations vs something that likes SHA256 + AdvSimd tricks). Overall, compiled languages like Rust, C / C++ have very good support due to years of dev effort invested in LLVM/GCC to support arm64 will, C# will also become one of the better running platforms starting with .NET 7 (6 is ok but 7 improves perf dramatically and vectorizes many code paths). Can't say anything about Java though. All in all, Graviton 2/3 on AWS is supposed to provide cheaper and denser compute which are its main selling points at the moment.
- jiggawatts 4y agoAzure for example will sell you an 8 vCPU x64 VM for more than an 8 vCPU ARM VM, but the ARM VM vCPUs are entire physical cores, whereas the Intel-compatible VM vCPUs are hyperthreads. So you get more cores and more cache for less money with ARM. For some workloads this makes a big difference.
- neonsunset 4y agoWhile true, the ampere cores are weaker than intel/amd ones. It remains a question of how much juice you get out of such vCPUs vs Ampere at capacity. Graviton 3 OTOH is much closer in terms of performance to what is usually offered in Xeon / Epyc.
- HyperSane 4y agoYou don't have to pay the Intel premium so you get better performance/$. I would be willing to bet AWS uses Graviton internally for many of their services like S3, DynamoDB, et. One thing to keep in mind is that ARM doesn't support Hyperthreading so you get twice the number of cores than with x86.
- philliphaydon 4y agoI just ran into issues last night with t4g instances. For the most part them have been great and the performance has been better for asp.net apps than Intel/AMD. But I ended up with a stack overflow exception with System.Text.Json in my personal project that only occurs on arm but not others. Still love the graviton instances.
- znpy 4y agoYou should blame that on your asp.net runtime though, not on the processor.
- philliphaydon 4y agoI’m not blaming the processor. Just sharing an experience I had last night. I wish GitHub actions supported arm64 so I could write some unit tests to reproduce it and figure out where the issue is in the runtime.
- dis-sys 4y agoI think the title is misleading - it is not a server performance comparison, it is just a comparison on a single application using a single kind of workload on a fixed dual core setup. It also lacks basic insights into the results, e.g., when both AWS and GCP are using ARM's Neoverse V1 design, why those two servers are having such significant performance gap? Maybe it was just caused by some bad software configuration in the stack which can void all relevant results? When there are up to 64 cores available, why only 2 cores were used? Surely other 62 cores are relevant, right?
- cherioo 4y agoAWS c7g uses V1 design; GCP and Azure are N1.
- adrian_b 4y agoOnly Amazon, i.e. AWS uses Neoverse V1. Google uses Neoverse N1. Neoverse N1 is a much older and slower CPU, derived from Cortex-A76. Neoverse V1 has a performance similar to Cortex-X1, but it also implements SVE (vector extension), which allows improved performance for floating-point applications. The big ARM cores from the Cortex-X and Neoverse V series have more execution units, up to a double number, in comparison with the medium-size ARM cores from the Cortex-A and Neoverse N series. For applications without much floating-point or large integer computations (where the Intel/AMD CPUs are the best), the Cortex-A/Neoverse N cores have a performance intermediate between a thread and a core of the Intel/AMD CPUs, so you need an 128-core Neoverse N CPU to beat a 64-core AMD CPU (which has 128 threads). For the same kind of applications, the Neoverse V cores have a performance similar to (slightly older) Intel/AMD cores, so a 64-core Neoverse V CPU can match a (previous generation) 64-core AMD CPU.
- dis-sys 4y agoAh, good to know that, thanks a lot!
- cherioo 4y agoThe article end up feeling rather overwhelming. The main difference and advantage AWS holds is that it uses the newer, more advanced (and more expensive) Neoverse V1 design, while GCP and Azure are based on Neoverse N1 design which is older, cheaper, and less performant. These are largely due to how these chip were designed by ARM. It may be argued that AWS also adds its secret sauce, but so far it feels unlikely. A cursory search leads to an phoronix article [0] which has a much more in depth comparison between V1 and N1 (through AWS's c7g vs. c6g instance types.) There are also upcoming N2 and V2 design; NVIDIA's Grace CPU is reportedly based on V2 design, which will be interesting to watch for. The 41% discount thrown in at the end for Azure, without any explanation, was also jarring. Maybe there truly is promotional rate for Azure's ARM instance, but as another poster pointed out, it's likely reserved pricing, which is available for all the providers. [0] https://www.phoronix.com/review/aws-graviton3-c7g https://www.phoronix.com/review/aws-graviton3-c7g
- m_mueller 4y agoJust FYI, if I copy out the URI of the article and want to open it again (or share it with someone) it gives a 404.
- Shorel 4y agoI have a process in AWS that can run on ARM or AMD64 machines. It runs in AMD64 machines because, for some reason, the Graviton instances are killed without warning by AWS. So yeah, great performance, as long as you don't actually need it.
- skywhopper 4y agoAre you using Spot instances?
- Shorel 4y agoYes, they are spot instances in an ASG. Still, the ASG group page doesn't show why are they killed. And I put a very high price limit (5 USD per hour) which is over 50 times what it actually costs per hour.
- philliphaydon 4y agoWhy not use non spot instances then?
- Shorel 4y agoCost optimization. This only needs to run when there are pending events, not 24/7. Also: this setup works perfectly fine with Intel instances.
- philliphaydon 4y agoI don't understand, you're paying more than normal hourly cost? Then it's not cost saving...
- Shorel 4y agoIt's an auction price. I am paying half than normal cost in average. The 'high' price was set up in case the instances were being killed because I was outbid by other AWS users. But the spot price has never been that high. The instances were killed anyway. So the reason is some technical glitch and not the price. It's a CPU and RAM intensive process. Something in the VM governor is killing VM processes if they exceed some threshold, killing my instances.
- ajross 4y agoSo... the news here is that GCP seems to be significantly slower in practice, where all three products are priced at the same spot. But... the weird question is why are the Azure financials funny? The listed prices are about the same, but the "annual cost" for Azure seems to include a "41% off" discount that I can't find an explanation for? And then they use the latter in the calculation of price efficiency, which seems... what? This is the kind of thing Comcast does in its marketing. What is that discount and what's the justification for assuming that all users get it in perpetuity?
- antifa 4y agoDoes GCP Cloud Run support ARM?