4 ms·

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

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
  - yazaddaruvala 3y ago
    I worked there for 10 years. Sure, when AWS was created Amazon.com didn’t use it. However today, Amazon.com is built entirely on AWS. It has been using EC2 and S3 since at least around 2010 (by 2013 “legacy hardware” was almost non-existent). Until 2020, it was all “hidden” behind Amazon’s internal tooling. Around 2019 there started to be a big push to just use AWS directly ie teams get AWS accounts owned by the Amazon.com org. There is still internal tooling to hook the code repo, build systems, and “pipelines” to directly deploy to AWS resources. Meanwhile, the “serverless” I was talking about in the previous post was an internal service that hosts a Lisp dialect called Datapath. As a developer, you write some Datapath and give them the money and it executes as much as you need it to. This service is the core of Amazon.com and was actively being migrated to Graviton.
qwytw 3y ago
But is ARM necessarily that more efficient or is it just cheaper than x86 because Amazon designed it inhouse and doesn't need to pay AMD/Intel (who have high margins)?
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  There's a reason it took over the smartphone industry decade before AWS started using them. Arm on the server isn't a radical idea and been proposed for a long time. Smartphones and servers share a lot of similar requirements like especially performance per watt
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > There's a reason it took over the smartphone industry Intel wasn't interested in "low-margin" markets and was generally incompetent?
    - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
      Well, yeah, no way I'm debating that. Weird thing is they had StrongArm in the early 2000s.
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  Web workloads aren't super CPU intensive on their own. You take some bytes from the network, parse them, make some calls to services on an internal network, then serialize and send network bytes. Most of that workload is waiting for the network bytes to come and go. For that kind of work it's all about power efficiency and Amazon is able to specifically design their gravitons to have just enough cache, CPU speed, management components, etc. to get the job done and nothing more. A bog standard Intel CPU is designed for any and every workload so it's going to be idling and wasting power on components and transistors you never use or care about.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

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
- yazaddaruvala 3y ago
  I worked there for 10 years. Sure, when AWS was created Amazon.com didn’t use it. However today, Amazon.com is built entirely on AWS. It has been using EC2 and S3 since at least around 2010 (by 2013 “legacy hardware” was almost non-existent). Until 2020, it was all “hidden” behind Amazon’s internal tooling. Around 2019 there started to be a big push to just use AWS directly ie teams get AWS accounts owned by the Amazon.com org. There is still internal tooling to hook the code repo, build systems, and “pipelines” to directly deploy to AWS resources. Meanwhile, the “serverless” I was talking about in the previous post was an internal service that hosts a Lisp dialect called Datapath. As a developer, you write some Datapath and give them the money and it executes as much as you need it to. This service is the core of Amazon.com and was actively being migrated to Graviton.

qwytw 3y ago

But is ARM necessarily that more efficient or is it just cheaper than x86 because Amazon designed it inhouse and doesn't need to pay AMD/Intel (who have high margins)?

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
There's a reason it took over the smartphone industry decade before AWS started using them. Arm on the server isn't a radical idea and been proposed for a long time. Smartphones and servers share a lot of similar requirements like especially performance per watt
- qwytw 3y ago
  > There's a reason it took over the smartphone industry Intel wasn't interested in "low-margin" markets and was generally incompetent?
  - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    Well, yeah, no way I'm debating that. Weird thing is they had StrongArm in the early 2000s.
qbasic_forever 3y ago
Web workloads aren't super CPU intensive on their own. You take some bytes from the network, parse them, make some calls to services on an internal network, then serialize and send network bytes. Most of that workload is waiting for the network bytes to come and go. For that kind of work it's all about power efficiency and Amazon is able to specifically design their gravitons to have just enough cache, CPU speed, management components, etc. to get the job done and nothing more. A bog standard Intel CPU is designed for any and every workload so it's going to be idling and wasting power on components and transistors you never use or care about.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]