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AWS C4 Instances
- pantulis 12y agoWhat does "optimized specifically for EC2" means?
- pantulis 12y agoNever mind, this must be it: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/13/amazons_new_ec2_compute_instances_run_on_secret_intel_chips/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/13/amazons_new_ec2_comp...
- mattzito 12y agoThere was another article that suggested they were manufactured specifically to amazon's standards for things like cooling and power stability. Instead of having to run in a wide range of environments, they can be designed to run in just the narrow range of Amazon's environment.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- ejdyksen 12y agoHere's the chip in question (Intel Xeon E5-2666): http://ark.intel.com/products/81706 http://ark.intel.com/products/81706 I don't think anyone but Amazon has this specific model. I don't see it available for sale anywhere.
- api 12y agoInteresting trend. If you could spec out the whole thing including cooling for use in a data center, you could probably do some really damn fast many-core chips that wouldn't be likely to sell much in the desktop and a la carte server markets.
- th0br0 12y agosee http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/11/13/intel-designs-custom-aws-cpu-for-fastest-ec2-instances-ever/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/11/13/intel...
- matthewrudy 12y agoIt's interesting that this new generation has moved away from onboard ssds. The extra features of EBS SSDs are pretty useful (ie. snapshotting) But having attached disks was super fast.
- makmanalp 12y agoI'm considering switching to these from C3 and it would be interesting to see hdparm outputs / etc on these if anyone is going to try them.
- pwarner 12y agoI presume they will add storage optimized instances with local disks in the future?
- matthewrudy 12y agoI guess so. Last time we spec-ed up an ElasticSearch cluster the SSD EBS didn't exist yet, so on-board SSDs was an obvious win. I should revisit it again some time.
- otterley 12y agoSSD instance storage will always be significantly faster than EBS storage, even if SSD-backed. I'm disappointed that Amazon dropped it from their C4 offering. For Elasticsearch, we use R3 (memory-optimized) instances which still have SSD instance storage. And boy is it ever fast.
- eropple 12y agoI don't care about disk speed nearly as much as I do reliability. EBS combines inconsistency with unreliability. It is the worst of both worlds for building a reliable, redundant infrastructure. I'm pretty bummed.
- chisleu 12y agoOnboard SSDs are better for some use cases... high volume queues come to mind. C3 SSDs were crazy faster than even the fastest EBS option listed, plus you could raid0 them... Fortunately for me, I don't need that much disk space and C3's aren't going anywhere for a while.
- helper 12y agoUgh, very disappointed to see these are EBS only.
- eropple 12y agoAgreed, and I think this isn't getting enough play. EBS is one of the more failure-prone parts of the AWS stack. I full-stop don't use EBS, anywhere, on any machine, because of the reliability concerns. (Since I am at least sort of competent, I design for redundancy and don't care if I lose a node anyway, so instance stores are fine.) These machines sound cool, but C3's will do me just fine.
- meltedice 12y agoEBS disks are far more durable (and convenient with S3 snapshots).
- otterley 12y agoThere's no question that what you sacrifice in performance with EBS, you get back in easy durability. But if you design your persistence layer with replicated instances, you can have the performance of instance storage. You'll need to make backups yourself, so it is a bit of extra work over making EBS snapshots, but IMO the performance gains are well worth it.
- eropple 12y agoEBS disks are more durable, sure. When you can reach them. You should be designing for failure, and EBS fails not infrequently relative to the rest of AWS. The problem is, when it fails, your instances go with it. Individual machines' durability is almost irrelevant. Your service's durability is very relevant. This is the most critical consideration in almost all cases in the cloud. EBS makes service durability much harder.
- helper 12y agoBesides my database servers, all of my machines are ephemeral[1]. I can lose machines and spin up new ones automatically (and therefore scale elastically). EBS adds an unnecessary additional point of failure that I want to avoid at all costs. Having run production systems in EC2 since 2010, I've survived numerous EBS outages as other services have crashed and burned by sticking to this philosophy. [1]: I don't use EBS for my database servers either. I use a replicated DB that can lose multiple machines simultaneously without loss of data (and is backed up to S3 in case of a catastrophic event).
- nissimk 12y agoIn case anyone else was wondering what "ability to control P-States and C-States" is about, I think this is a useful reference [1]. I guess with the C4-8Xlarge you control the entire physical machine and you can enable additional P-states to get more power out of the cpu while using more electricity. [1] http://www.xenserver.org/partners/developing-products-for-xenserver/19-dev-help/138-xs-dev-perf-turbo.html http://www.xenserver.org/partners/developing-products-for-xe...
- tedunangst 12y agoThat's a strange feature to include on a machine I'm not paying the power or cooling bill for. Why would I ever set it to anything other than 11?
- dbarlett 12y agoFrom https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-new-c4-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-new-c4-instan... : In some cases, your workload might not need all 18 of the cores (each of which runs two hyperthreads, for a total of 36 vCPUs on c4.8xlarge). To tune your application for better performance, you can manage the power consumption on a per-core basis. This is known as C-state management, and gives you control over the sleep level that a core may enter when idle. Let’s say that your code needs just two cores. Your operating system can set the other 16 cores to a state that draws little or no power, thereby creating some thermal headroom that will give the remaining cores an opportunity to Turbo Boost. You also have control over the desired performance (CPU clock frequency); this is known as P-state management. You should consider changing C-state settings to decrease CPU latency variability (cores in a sleep state consume less power, but deeper sleep states require longer to become active when needed) and consider changing P-state settings to adjust the variability in CPU frequency in order to best meet the needs of your application.
- tedunangst 12y agoI question the real world utility/practicality of this, but thanks for the explanation. To elaborate: I start with (e.g.) a 2 cpu c4 instance. But my single thread performance isn't fast enough. So I'm going to spend a king's random to upgrade to a 36 cpu instance, just so I can disable 35 of those cpus? There are several other options I'd probably investigate first.
- pwarner 12y agoShould we expext R4 (ram optimized) or M4 (balanced) instances soon or is the high cost of DDR4 going to delay things? I am about to reserve some R3 instances so maybe that will speed it up :-)
- api 12y agoStill damn expensive compared to things like a dedicated server from here: http://www.kimsufi.com/en/ http://www.kimsufi.com/en/ Amazon seems to offer more network bandwidth though, so they might have an advantage for CPU-heavy and network-heavy loads. But from the testing I've done Amazon comes in almost dead last for cost/performance on most metrics. I suppose they could make sense if you make heavy use of all their services, and maybe their cost/performance improves with scale?
- SuperKlaus 12y agoPlus seamless integration with everything else AWS.
- click170 12y agoYou should be aware though that integrating with AWS services that aren't also provided by AWS' competition, you're increasing the cost of switching away from AWS in the future. I'm not saying don't do it, I'm just saying be aware that you may be making it harder for your company to change providers down the road.
- johansch 12y agoExactly. I would think very, very, very hard about building something on top of any AWS technologies for which there are no good open substitutes of.
- sseveran 12y agoWhy wouldn't you take advantage of everything your platform gives you? This goes for your OS as well as your infrastructure.
- johansch 12y agoBecause you want to avoid locking your future with one particular service supplier. Particularly one that charges so much (for e.g. bandwidth) as AWS.
- moe 12y agoPricing still looks pretty far out there. Their CPU has a passmark score of 16k[1] and they ask $1300 USD/mo for it. Hetzner will rent you one with passmark 10k[2] for $60/mo... [1] http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2680+v2+%40+2.80GHz http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2680+v... [2] http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-4770+%40+3.40GHz&id=1907 http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-4770+%...
- ianlevesque 12y agoAWS is expensive for some definitions of expensive, water is wet. That is a crazy difference though if you can take advantage of it.
- micro-ram 12y agoI would love to leave my colo for AWS but the numbers just don't work.
- ddorian43 12y agoyou forgot the bandwidth price
- meltedice 12y agoThat assumes that there's only one chip in the server (unlikely with 36 vcpus listed for C4), that you're happy with using a desktop chip with no ECC for Hetzner, and your pricing doesn't consider reserved instance pricing for C4 which costs much less than $1300.
- latch 12y agoThough notably more than the quoted $50, for €69, you get a server chip and ECC.
- moe 12y agoThe ECC version costs $81/mo at Hetzner. 3 years reserved c4.8xlarge costs $501/mo at EC2. If you can commit for 3 years, why would you pay a 6x markup for "elasticity"? (11x if you commit for only 1 year...)
- lukego 12y agoIs the Enhanced Networking on a C4 instance a Virtual Function (ixgbev driver) or a full Physical Function (ixgbe driver)? The docs say that it is a VF but I wonder since they are offering the full 10G of bandwidth. We could relocate our Snabb Lab to AWS if we got PFs. https://github.com/SnabbCo/snabbswitch/wiki/Snabb-Lab https://github.com/SnabbCo/snabbswitch/wiki/Snabb-Lab
- smwht 12y agoIt looks like it still loads the ixgbevf driver: # ethtool -i eth0 driver: ixgbevf
- latch 12y agoRan UnixBench c4.2xlarge https://gist.github.com/karlseguin/a659ef87b3a4a5d590e9 https://gist.github.com/karlseguin/a659ef87b3a4a5d590e9 c4.8xlarge https://gist.github.com/karlseguin/0f38b9ad87ebd54375da https://gist.github.com/karlseguin/0f38b9ad87ebd54375da i7-4770 https://gist.github.com/karlseguin/5a6a45ace2048545b6c3 https://gist.github.com/karlseguin/5a6a45ace2048545b6c3
- wise_young_man 12y agoFor those who prefer AWS blog posts over the product page: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-new-c4-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-new-c4-instan...