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It will get worse when the manufacturers of the best performing hardware will be the cloud providers themselves :) I am afraid Amazon will slowly drown out inde

by c0l0 4y ago

It will get worse when the manufacturers of the best performing hardware will be the cloud providers themselves :) I am afraid Amazon will slowly drown out independent CPU (and eventually other gear, but with CPUs the playbook is most evident) manufacturers. Today, Intel (and probably also AMD et al.) offer them exclusive deals on and even exclusive models of their hardware, due to the insane volumes "hyper-scalers" procure. In parallel, Amazon offers their own CPU arch (Graviton) cheaper than x86 cores to users of their platform in order to make it more attractive - at the insane margin AWS operates at, it can make these instances a loss leader, no problem. As a result, those in the x86 market that do not have a cloud business attached will grow weaker and weaker in comparison, and most cloud-native developer mindshare will shift to the cheaper option (since most engineering work in cloud envs is about reducing cost, period), which is AWS/GCP/... custom CPUs. And you, the random shmuck with an appetite for powerful on-prem hardware, will be left with worse products to buy for a higher price.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
I'm not sure this is actually true. Intel and AMD are not thrilled that Amazon and Google have so much market power as their buyers. They are willing to give you a lot of other value-added products and a TON of engineering help along with their CPUs if you are buying a cluster. They will also give you a decent price (not as good as they have to give to hyperscalers, but good), and try to establish a long-term relationship with you. Also, cloud environments are rarely cost reductions. They are very frequently more expensive than on-prem deployments, but they are used because they are easy to spin up and down and they allow you to engineer things faster.
hinkley 4y ago
The 'cool' thing - from a vendor's perspective at least - is that running your applications locally gives you a lower confidence interval when production is a different chip architecture than developer machines, so you have to spin up more pre-prod machines to be really sure your code actually behaves. Or use some other strategy that all ends in the same place: more servers to concurrently run more revisions of your code.

by c0l0 4y ago

pclmulqdq 4y ago

I'm not sure this is actually true. Intel and AMD are not thrilled that Amazon and Google have so much market power as their buyers. They are willing to give you a lot of other value-added products and a TON of engineering help along with their CPUs if you are buying a cluster. They will also give you a decent price (not as good as they have to give to hyperscalers, but good), and try to establish a long-term relationship with you. Also, cloud environments are rarely cost reductions. They are very frequently more expensive than on-prem deployments, but they are used because they are easy to spin up and down and they allow you to engineer things faster.

hinkley 4y ago

The 'cool' thing - from a vendor's perspective at least - is that running your applications locally gives you a lower confidence interval when production is a different chip architecture than developer machines, so you have to spin up more pre-prod machines to be really sure your code actually behaves. Or use some other strategy that all ends in the same place: more servers to concurrently run more revisions of your code.