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For small consumer products sure, but we're talking at the extreme end of performance and physical capabilities. Sure you can get a 2Ghz CPU for ~2x the price o

For small consumer products sure, but we're talking at the extreme end of performance and physical capabilities. Sure you can get a 2Ghz CPU for ~2x the price of a 200Mhz CPU, but how much are you going to pay for a 6.0Ghz CPU vs 5.0Ghz? 6.1Ghz vs 6.0Ghz?

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
Think cores instead of clock speeds. In the case of cloud instances, doubling cores is frequently less than 100% more expensive.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  Increasing core count is not really vertical scaling. It's a hybrid between vertical and horizontal scaling, having some characteristics of both. It also tops out quite early (especially its cost-effectiveness for many use cases, but there's an absolute upper limit as well).
- morelisp 3y ago
  https://aws.amazon.com/msk/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/msk/pricing/ prices scale linearly with CPU beginning with m5.large, and I wouldn't really want to run a production Kafka on anything less than m5.xlarge. (They do at least keep linearly scaling all the way up.) Speculating wildly, I could probably have run some of our real clusters on the equivalent of a 8xlarge, but of course 32 core systems were not widely available at that time. The cluster I run today, even a hypothetical 48xlarge would struggle. YMMV for non-managed stuff, but really, you can only bump cores like 3 times realistically, 4 if you started really shitty, before you start getting into special pricing brackets.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
You can go from a 8T/16C Epyc 7xxx series CPU to a 32T/64C CPU and not even double the cost.
- fluoridation 3y ago
  That's more like horizontal scaling, though. You get more throughput (transactions per second) but not lower latency (seconds per transaction). Though it may be more cost-effective to have a single 32-core machine than two 16-core machines.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    I disagree with this definition of horizontal scaling. If you're moving to a bigger computer rather than more computers, then you're scaling vertically and not horizontally. (and fwiw, wikipedia agrees with this definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability#Horizontal_(scale_out)_and_vertical_scaling_(scale_up) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability#Horizontal_(scale_... )
    - fluoridation 3y ago
      Then it sounds like you have a disagreement of terminology with FTA, since the article is using the terms like I am. Vertical scaling means increasing the serial performance of the system, and horizontal scaling means increasing the parallel performance of the system. In this sense, vertical scaling past a certain point does indeed get exponentially more expensive, while horizontal scaling almost always scales linearly in cost, or better.
      - marginalia_nu 3y ago
        What I'm commenting on is this phrasing from the article > Vertical scaling — a bigger, exponentially more expensive server > Horizontal scaling — distribute the load over more servers
        teawrecks 3y ago
        Ok, I see where the lay person would get confused on this. In the context of this article, every core is what Wikipedia calls a "node". There is no difference between a single 32C CPU and 4x 8C CPUs except for their ability to share memory faster. Both are similarly defined as horizontal scaling in the context of this article. You're not going to finish a single workload any faster, but you're going to increase the throughput of finishing multiple workloads in parallel. The fact that AMD chooses to package the "nodes" together on one die vs multiple doesn't change that.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago

Think cores instead of clock speeds. In the case of cloud instances, doubling cores is frequently less than 100% more expensive.

The_Colonel 3y ago
Increasing core count is not really vertical scaling. It's a hybrid between vertical and horizontal scaling, having some characteristics of both. It also tops out quite early (especially its cost-effectiveness for many use cases, but there's an absolute upper limit as well).
morelisp 3y ago
https://aws.amazon.com/msk/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/msk/pricing/ prices scale linearly with CPU beginning with m5.large, and I wouldn't really want to run a production Kafka on anything less than m5.xlarge. (They do at least keep linearly scaling all the way up.) Speculating wildly, I could probably have run some of our real clusters on the equivalent of a 8xlarge, but of course 32 core systems were not widely available at that time. The cluster I run today, even a hypothetical 48xlarge would struggle. YMMV for non-managed stuff, but really, you can only bump cores like 3 times realistically, 4 if you started really shitty, before you start getting into special pricing brackets.

marginalia_nu 3y ago

You can go from a 8T/16C Epyc 7xxx series CPU to a 32T/64C CPU and not even double the cost.

fluoridation 3y ago
That's more like horizontal scaling, though. You get more throughput (transactions per second) but not lower latency (seconds per transaction). Though it may be more cost-effective to have a single 32-core machine than two 16-core machines.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  I disagree with this definition of horizontal scaling. If you're moving to a bigger computer rather than more computers, then you're scaling vertically and not horizontally. (and fwiw, wikipedia agrees with this definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability#Horizontal_(scale_out)_and_vertical_scaling_(scale_up) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability#Horizontal_(scale_... )
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    Then it sounds like you have a disagreement of terminology with FTA, since the article is using the terms like I am. Vertical scaling means increasing the serial performance of the system, and horizontal scaling means increasing the parallel performance of the system. In this sense, vertical scaling past a certain point does indeed get exponentially more expensive, while horizontal scaling almost always scales linearly in cost, or better.
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      What I'm commenting on is this phrasing from the article > Vertical scaling — a bigger, exponentially more expensive server > Horizontal scaling — distribute the load over more servers
      - teawrecks 3y ago
        Ok, I see where the lay person would get confused on this. In the context of this article, every core is what Wikipedia calls a "node". There is no difference between a single 32C CPU and 4x 8C CPUs except for their ability to share memory faster. Both are similarly defined as horizontal scaling in the context of this article. You're not going to finish a single workload any faster, but you're going to increase the throughput of finishing multiple workloads in parallel. The fact that AMD chooses to package the "nodes" together on one die vs multiple doesn't change that.