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Graviton server and serverless functions have shown such a better performance to cost ratio, it's unsurprising Amazon is doubling down on those. The real quest

Graviton server and serverless functions have shown such a better performance to cost ratio, it's unsurprising Amazon is doubling down on those. The real question is, why are other cloud providers not working on similar chips?

zokier 3y ago
> The real question is, why are other cloud providers not working on similar chips? I suspect the answer is simple; they are nowhere near as flush with cash to buy up a CPU company and invest years to make their own chips. It's no small endeavor that AWS has gone through to get here.
- acdha 3y ago
  Not just cash but also willing to make investments which don’t show returns within a year. Amazon has a history of very lean profits due to reinvestment and something like this might not be possible with Google’s promotion culture, especially adoption takes time so the initial numbers won’t be compelling.
- jsnell 3y ago
  Microsoft and Google are far more flush with cash than Amazon is. Out of the smaller cloud providers, IBM and Oracle wouldn't have needed to buy a CPU company, they'd both been designing top tier CPUs for decades. Here's an alternative equally simple explanation: ARM doesn't actually have anywhere near the level of advantage in perf/$ that Amazon's pricing would imply. The price differential on AWS isn't coming from any kind of intrinsic advantage, but from Amazon subsidizing their ARM-based compute for strategic reasons.
  - dangus 3y ago
    Ampere ARM chips still have a similar price advantage (check out Hetzner cloud pricing, for example).
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > Out of the smaller cloud providers, IBM and Oracle wouldn't have needed to buy a CPU company, they'd both been designing top tier CPUs for decades. CPUs that need an insane amount of power and have barely any applications in mainstream computing. Not exactly a good fit to provide to customers. > The price differential on AWS isn't coming from any kind of intrinsic advantage, but from Amazon subsidizing their ARM-based compute for strategic reasons. By running their own CPUs, AWS doesn't have to rely on Intel's ability and willingness to ship stuff and they don't have to pay Intel's margin either.
    - jsnell 3y ago
      > CPUs that need an insane amount of power and have barely any applications in mainstream computing. Not exactly a good fit to provide to customers. Obviously there's no real market for Sparc or POWER in the public cloud, and there probably never was a time window for creating a viable market either. But if they'd wanted to get into the server ARM market, they would have had the expertise in-house, there was no need to buy out some startup for the team. That their expertise was on CPUs with different microarchitectures, but that shouldn't matter all that much (didn't matter when Apple bought PA Semi to work on ARM instead of PowerPC). > By running their own CPUs, AWS doesn't have to rely on Intel's ability and willingness to ship stuff and they don't have to pay Intel's margin either. Right, being in control of your own destiny rather than being tied to a single supplier is a big deal, and that's one example of what I meant by the strategic reasons. Having more leverage over Intel and AMD on pricing is another. Making it harder for some customers to move their workloads away (because they're bought into ARM and other companies don't have compelling ARM offerings) is a potential third. Not having to pay Intel's margins is a potential advantage, but requires reaching sufficient scale to offset the costs of running your own CPU team. But for any of this to make sense, they need to successfully move a large proportion of their customers over to ARM. Just having the servers available and nobody using them does nothing. That's exactly the kind of situation where you'd want to subsidize the prices for the ARM servers and build up the customer base. That's the case even if ARM has some intrinsic perf/$ advantage; you'd still want to subsidize it to the point where you're able to saturate your ability to manufacture and install ARM servers.
  - qbasic_forever 3y ago
    If ARM wasn't more efficient for Amazon then they wouldn't be aggressively moving their entire internal AWS infrastructure to gravitons. I've heard from folks in the know there that every single new service big or small internally has to work on graviton and by default is expected to launch on it unless the product goes through hoops to justify x86 and its expense.
    - yazaddaruvala 3y ago
      Even in 2021, most of Amazon Retail’s workloads were “serverless” and the entire platform was actively flipping to Graviton one cluster at a time.
      - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
        How do you know? Is there a link I could read about this? I've heard Amazon.com doesn't even use AWS — was this ever acurate?
        PNewling 3y ago
        >I've heard Amazon.com doesn't even use AWS — was this ever acurate? What? AWS spun out of Amazon.com having extra servers/infa after the holiday season rush and pushed for an internal way to monetize their extra compute/storage power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/amazon/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/amazon/
        inemesitaffia 3y ago
        It's a creation myth/legend IIRC
        Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
        I've read that they did use it for some time then stopped. People then took AWS to be "Amazon Scale" despite not being true/misleading.[0] If I'm reading it right, even your own link only says they are using s3 for backing up their database. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4181014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4181014 [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33024415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33024415
  - Iwan-Zotow 3y ago
    > IBM and Oracle wouldn't have needed to buy a CPU company, they'd both been designing top tier CPUs for decades you HAVE TO HAVE those CPUs on devs laptops. Otherwise it just won't work. Macs with M1/M2 are pretty much ideal setup to develop for gravitons
mabbo 3y ago
I'm sure they are. But Amazon has a multi year lead. Amazon took a gamble on server ARM chips. Not a bad or blind gamble, but they had no idea if their customers would take to them at all. I'm sure if they hadn't, we'd all be sitting here saying what an obviously dumb waste of money.
- klysm 3y ago
  AWS has a massive economic hand in ARM support. By offering cheaper compute on the ARM platform, they gave enough reason for everybody to make things work on ARM. I think they had a pretty good idea that customers would make it work for the price
torginus 3y ago
Do they? My experience is that they cost somewhat less, and are somewhat slower than the Intel competition. Their price/perf advantage is mostly in synthetic benchmarks, IRL the difference is much less pronounced.
- lokar 3y ago
  We found a big improvement and are moving a very large footprint over.
qwytw 3y ago
So far they seem to be betting on Ampere which seems to be developing their own cores (which is much more complex/expensive than what Amazon is doing) so it's interesting how they will do. If Ampere manages to get a moat AWS might end up behind everyone else in a couple of years.

zokier 3y ago

> The real question is, why are other cloud providers not working on similar chips? I suspect the answer is simple; they are nowhere near as flush with cash to buy up a CPU company and invest years to make their own chips. It's no small endeavor that AWS has gone through to get here.

acdha 3y ago
Not just cash but also willing to make investments which don’t show returns within a year. Amazon has a history of very lean profits due to reinvestment and something like this might not be possible with Google’s promotion culture, especially adoption takes time so the initial numbers won’t be compelling.
jsnell 3y ago
Microsoft and Google are far more flush with cash than Amazon is. Out of the smaller cloud providers, IBM and Oracle wouldn't have needed to buy a CPU company, they'd both been designing top tier CPUs for decades. Here's an alternative equally simple explanation: ARM doesn't actually have anywhere near the level of advantage in perf/$ that Amazon's pricing would imply. The price differential on AWS isn't coming from any kind of intrinsic advantage, but from Amazon subsidizing their ARM-based compute for strategic reasons.
- dangus 3y ago
  Ampere ARM chips still have a similar price advantage (check out Hetzner cloud pricing, for example).
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Out of the smaller cloud providers, IBM and Oracle wouldn't have needed to buy a CPU company, they'd both been designing top tier CPUs for decades. CPUs that need an insane amount of power and have barely any applications in mainstream computing. Not exactly a good fit to provide to customers. > The price differential on AWS isn't coming from any kind of intrinsic advantage, but from Amazon subsidizing their ARM-based compute for strategic reasons. By running their own CPUs, AWS doesn't have to rely on Intel's ability and willingness to ship stuff and they don't have to pay Intel's margin either.
  - jsnell 3y ago
    > CPUs that need an insane amount of power and have barely any applications in mainstream computing. Not exactly a good fit to provide to customers. Obviously there's no real market for Sparc or POWER in the public cloud, and there probably never was a time window for creating a viable market either. But if they'd wanted to get into the server ARM market, they would have had the expertise in-house, there was no need to buy out some startup for the team. That their expertise was on CPUs with different microarchitectures, but that shouldn't matter all that much (didn't matter when Apple bought PA Semi to work on ARM instead of PowerPC). > By running their own CPUs, AWS doesn't have to rely on Intel's ability and willingness to ship stuff and they don't have to pay Intel's margin either. Right, being in control of your own destiny rather than being tied to a single supplier is a big deal, and that's one example of what I meant by the strategic reasons. Having more leverage over Intel and AMD on pricing is another. Making it harder for some customers to move their workloads away (because they're bought into ARM and other companies don't have compelling ARM offerings) is a potential third. Not having to pay Intel's margins is a potential advantage, but requires reaching sufficient scale to offset the costs of running your own CPU team. But for any of this to make sense, they need to successfully move a large proportion of their customers over to ARM. Just having the servers available and nobody using them does nothing. That's exactly the kind of situation where you'd want to subsidize the prices for the ARM servers and build up the customer base. That's the case even if ARM has some intrinsic perf/$ advantage; you'd still want to subsidize it to the point where you're able to saturate your ability to manufacture and install ARM servers.
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  If ARM wasn't more efficient for Amazon then they wouldn't be aggressively moving their entire internal AWS infrastructure to gravitons. I've heard from folks in the know there that every single new service big or small internally has to work on graviton and by default is expected to launch on it unless the product goes through hoops to justify x86 and its expense.
  - yazaddaruvala 3y ago
    Even in 2021, most of Amazon Retail’s workloads were “serverless” and the entire platform was actively flipping to Graviton one cluster at a time.
    - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
      How do you know? Is there a link I could read about this? I've heard Amazon.com doesn't even use AWS — was this ever acurate?
      - PNewling 3y ago
        >I've heard Amazon.com doesn't even use AWS — was this ever acurate? What? AWS spun out of Amazon.com having extra servers/infa after the holiday season rush and pushed for an internal way to monetize their extra compute/storage power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/amazon/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/amazon/
        inemesitaffia 3y ago
        It's a creation myth/legend IIRC
        Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
        I've read that they did use it for some time then stopped. People then took AWS to be "Amazon Scale" despite not being true/misleading.[0] If I'm reading it right, even your own link only says they are using s3 for backing up their database. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4181014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4181014 [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33024415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33024415
- Iwan-Zotow 3y ago
  > IBM and Oracle wouldn't have needed to buy a CPU company, they'd both been designing top tier CPUs for decades you HAVE TO HAVE those CPUs on devs laptops. Otherwise it just won't work. Macs with M1/M2 are pretty much ideal setup to develop for gravitons

mabbo 3y ago

I'm sure they are. But Amazon has a multi year lead. Amazon took a gamble on server ARM chips. Not a bad or blind gamble, but they had no idea if their customers would take to them at all. I'm sure if they hadn't, we'd all be sitting here saying what an obviously dumb waste of money.

klysm 3y ago
AWS has a massive economic hand in ARM support. By offering cheaper compute on the ARM platform, they gave enough reason for everybody to make things work on ARM. I think they had a pretty good idea that customers would make it work for the price

torginus 3y ago

Do they? My experience is that they cost somewhat less, and are somewhat slower than the Intel competition. Their price/perf advantage is mostly in synthetic benchmarks, IRL the difference is much less pronounced.

lokar 3y ago
We found a big improvement and are moving a very large footprint over.

qwytw 3y ago

So far they seem to be betting on Ampere which seems to be developing their own cores (which is much more complex/expensive than what Amazon is doing) so it's interesting how they will do. If Ampere manages to get a moat AWS might end up behind everyone else in a couple of years.