3 ms·

> being driven by hyperscalers like Amazon and the perverse incentive caused by their pricing structures Not really. They can and do price it otherwise e.g. wi

by re-thc 2y ago

> being driven by hyperscalers like Amazon and the perverse incentive caused by their pricing structures Not really. They can and do price it otherwise e.g. with different instance types. If we had to blame something then it's the move away from the traditional software licensing model. In the past, self-install software e.g. databases, OSes, etc would charge per core / CPU and that would be a huge chunk of the expenses added up. Now that we're free from this things are a lot different. Having said that, the desktop side is still aiming for high-perf cores for e.g. gaming. It's not lost - just harder and harder to do. > It can't have escaped people's notice how slow cloud VCPUs are It's not that slow. It comes down to choosing the right instances and staying current. EPYC 4th gen single core on e.g. Amazon i.e. c7a is not the same as a 6th year old laptop CPU? It's also not hundreds of dollars per month (reserved / spot instances are the way to go). Also this is nothing new. I remember the days of companies running their own VMWare data centers and those server Xeons were a lot slower. There are just heat and density concerns even if you had to do it yourself.

paol 2y ago
Funny enough c7a is just what we chose recently for our CI runners precisely because of the better CPU performance. It's only better relatively to the terribleness of the t* types though. And it definitely costs hundreds of dollars per month. Just ran the calculator and 8 VPCUs (to keep the rough laptop analogy) comes out at $316.
- re-thc 2y ago
  > It's only better relatively to the terribleness of the t* types though. It's never a value add to use the t* types. That's poor misinformation or at least outdated information that people keep spreading. The advantage of c7a or Graviton 3 though is you get real cores. Most of the t* get you vCPUs, and 1/2 of it are just threads. It can be up to 2x faster in that sense. > Just ran the calculator and 8 VPCUs (to keep the rough laptop analogy) comes out at $316. Does your laptop have 8 real cores not threads that can 24/7 keep its peak speeds? Most overheat and throttle... are we comparing the same thing? ??? USD? c7a.2xlarge (8 vCPU) spot instance pricing is $0.1032 = ~$80/month (us-east-1) Even on just a 3 year compute savings plan and we're on $144.71/month. You're not required to commit to a particular instance type - just the spending, so all good? This is excluding storage. Either way there's no reason to use EC2 On-Demand without a savings plan or spot. At least commit some of it a year and it's a big saving. Otherwise don't use AWS. Side note: EPYC 5th gen has been announced and we'll likely see way more improvements on top. Pricing will definitely go down. Also: this is just a rant on AWS. Hetzner, OVH or even Oracle cloud is way cheaper, like maybe 1/2 to 1/10 of this $316... it's not a cloud issue - just AWS.
  - paol 2y ago
    You're slightly off in your understanding of VCPUs. All AWS instances "get" VCPUs. A VCPU is a single thread in architectures with SMT and a single core in architectures without. So for example c7a instances which are AMD EPYCs have 1 VCPU = 1/2 core. They have is a page that lists this for every single instance type which I can't be bothered to search for right now. As for spot instances, they're a great if you can use them, but you can't hold their price as being representative. Now using savings plan prices as representative is defensible, but it won't bring the cost below the "hundreds per month" order of magnitude.
    - phonon 2y ago
      Hyperthreading is turned off on m7a/c7a/r7a. "One of the major differences between M7a instances and the previous generations of instances, such as M6a instances, is their vCPU to physical processor core mapping. Every vCPU on a M7a instance is a physical CPU core. This means there is no Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT). By contrast, every vCPU on prior generations such as M6a instances is a thread of a CPU core." https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/m7a/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/m7a/
      - paol 2y ago
        > Hyperthreading is turned off on m7a/c7a/r7a. You made me go check and you're right! Thanks for the correction.

by re-thc 2y ago

paol 2y ago

Funny enough c7a is just what we chose recently for our CI runners precisely because of the better CPU performance. It's only better relatively to the terribleness of the t* types though. And it definitely costs hundreds of dollars per month. Just ran the calculator and 8 VPCUs (to keep the rough laptop analogy) comes out at $316.

re-thc 2y ago
> It's only better relatively to the terribleness of the t* types though. It's never a value add to use the t* types. That's poor misinformation or at least outdated information that people keep spreading. The advantage of c7a or Graviton 3 though is you get real cores. Most of the t* get you vCPUs, and 1/2 of it are just threads. It can be up to 2x faster in that sense. > Just ran the calculator and 8 VPCUs (to keep the rough laptop analogy) comes out at $316. Does your laptop have 8 real cores not threads that can 24/7 keep its peak speeds? Most overheat and throttle... are we comparing the same thing? ??? USD? c7a.2xlarge (8 vCPU) spot instance pricing is $0.1032 = ~$80/month (us-east-1) Even on just a 3 year compute savings plan and we're on $144.71/month. You're not required to commit to a particular instance type - just the spending, so all good? This is excluding storage. Either way there's no reason to use EC2 On-Demand without a savings plan or spot. At least commit some of it a year and it's a big saving. Otherwise don't use AWS. Side note: EPYC 5th gen has been announced and we'll likely see way more improvements on top. Pricing will definitely go down. Also: this is just a rant on AWS. Hetzner, OVH or even Oracle cloud is way cheaper, like maybe 1/2 to 1/10 of this $316... it's not a cloud issue - just AWS.
- paol 2y ago
  You're slightly off in your understanding of VCPUs. All AWS instances "get" VCPUs. A VCPU is a single thread in architectures with SMT and a single core in architectures without. So for example c7a instances which are AMD EPYCs have 1 VCPU = 1/2 core. They have is a page that lists this for every single instance type which I can't be bothered to search for right now. As for spot instances, they're a great if you can use them, but you can't hold their price as being representative. Now using savings plan prices as representative is defensible, but it won't bring the cost below the "hundreds per month" order of magnitude.
  - phonon 2y ago
    Hyperthreading is turned off on m7a/c7a/r7a. "One of the major differences between M7a instances and the previous generations of instances, such as M6a instances, is their vCPU to physical processor core mapping. Every vCPU on a M7a instance is a physical CPU core. This means there is no Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT). By contrast, every vCPU on prior generations such as M6a instances is a thread of a CPU core." https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/m7a/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/m7a/
    - paol 2y ago
      > Hyperthreading is turned off on m7a/c7a/r7a. You made me go check and you're right! Thanks for the correction.