4 ms·

Besides hacker curiosity, what's the appeal of ARM from our perspective? I'm not seeing a cost advantage here compared to Kimsufi (dedicated) or a good SSD-back

by nly 12y ago

Besides hacker curiosity, what's the appeal of ARM from our perspective? I'm not seeing a cost advantage here compared to Kimsufi (dedicated) or a good SSD-backed VPS.

brianwawok 12y ago
The not sharing CPU part. Worse average perf but better worse case perf.
lbft 12y ago
In theory, consistent performance (particularly CPU) since you aren't sharing a node. In practice, you're stuck dealing with the sort of headaches that come with doing something unusual, like repos not having packages you want. Overall it seemed to work reasonably during the beta but I'm surprised they weren't more aggressive with pricing. Hard to argue with the value if you are actually using the bandwidth, but otherwise not that interesting an offer from a practical perspective.
- dragontamer 12y ago
  http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/ http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/ Kimsufi offers true dedicated Atom boxes with SSDs for 10 GBPs / month. I also think that if you're "using the bandwidth", a $5/month Digital Ocean VM is probably a better value.
  - nly 12y ago
    Kimsufi are unmetered 100Mbps, and they seem to live up to that promise without throttling.
jfindley 12y ago
Compared to a VPS there's some security benefits. You can't meaningfully encrypt the disk of a VPS - as the decryption key can easily be read out of memory by the host. A physical server offers slightly more protection than this - although if there's no TPM not all that much. VMs are also bad at some specific tasks - they have issues with clock accuracy for example. One appeal of ARM, specifically, would be that it's cheap. Sadly these are based on ARMv7, which is a lot more limited than aarch64/ARMv8 and Intel CPUs. - but hopefully they or someone else will have an ARMv8 offering out soon.
- anonymousDan 12y ago
  I wonder if they offer any access to trustzone? That would be pretty cool.
- timthorn 12y ago
  They already are: http://datacentred.co.uk/datacentred-world-first-openstack-public-cloud-on-64-bit-arm-servers/ http://datacentred.co.uk/datacentred-world-first-openstack-p...
therealwill 12y ago
Developing on an ARM server is a lot different than on x86. You will find that some packages don't work and a bunch of undocumented bugs. Some people believe that ARM is the future for servers since they're more energy efficient (eh... kind of) so it would be good practice to get ahead of the curb.
- retrogradeorbit 12y ago
  Sorry to be pedantic, but the idiom is "ahead of the curve".
fweespeech 12y ago
There isn't one, frankly. You'd be better off getting one of Online.NET's 30 euro nodes and using the Object Store from Scaleway. That is the only part of this announcement that appeals to me, tbh. .02 euro per GB for premium Bandwidth + data storage. Compared to S3 Europe that is ridiculously good if you can eat the slightly higher latency.
- ddorian43 12y ago
  Compare the s3 alternative with runabove: https://www.runabove.com/storage/object-storage.xml https://www.runabove.com/storage/object-storage.xml
  - fweespeech 12y ago
    Tbh, the latency I've seen with RunAbove is worse and at .02 Euros per GB...we are talking $20 vs. $10 per Terabyte of bandwidth.
codexon 12y ago
Kimsufi seems to be continually out of stock for the past year if you haven't noticed.

by nly 12y ago

Besides hacker curiosity, what's the appeal of ARM from our perspective? I'm not seeing a cost advantage here compared to Kimsufi (dedicated) or a good SSD-backed VPS.

brianwawok 12y ago

The not sharing CPU part. Worse average perf but better worse case perf.

lbft 12y ago

In theory, consistent performance (particularly CPU) since you aren't sharing a node. In practice, you're stuck dealing with the sort of headaches that come with doing something unusual, like repos not having packages you want. Overall it seemed to work reasonably during the beta but I'm surprised they weren't more aggressive with pricing. Hard to argue with the value if you are actually using the bandwidth, but otherwise not that interesting an offer from a practical perspective.

dragontamer 12y ago
http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/ http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/ Kimsufi offers true dedicated Atom boxes with SSDs for 10 GBPs / month. I also think that if you're "using the bandwidth", a $5/month Digital Ocean VM is probably a better value.
- nly 12y ago
  Kimsufi are unmetered 100Mbps, and they seem to live up to that promise without throttling.

jfindley 12y ago

Compared to a VPS there's some security benefits. You can't meaningfully encrypt the disk of a VPS - as the decryption key can easily be read out of memory by the host. A physical server offers slightly more protection than this - although if there's no TPM not all that much. VMs are also bad at some specific tasks - they have issues with clock accuracy for example. One appeal of ARM, specifically, would be that it's cheap. Sadly these are based on ARMv7, which is a lot more limited than aarch64/ARMv8 and Intel CPUs. - but hopefully they or someone else will have an ARMv8 offering out soon.

anonymousDan 12y ago
I wonder if they offer any access to trustzone? That would be pretty cool.
timthorn 12y ago
They already are: http://datacentred.co.uk/datacentred-world-first-openstack-public-cloud-on-64-bit-arm-servers/ http://datacentred.co.uk/datacentred-world-first-openstack-p...

therealwill 12y ago

Developing on an ARM server is a lot different than on x86. You will find that some packages don't work and a bunch of undocumented bugs. Some people believe that ARM is the future for servers since they're more energy efficient (eh... kind of) so it would be good practice to get ahead of the curb.

retrogradeorbit 12y ago
Sorry to be pedantic, but the idiom is "ahead of the curve".

fweespeech 12y ago

There isn't one, frankly. You'd be better off getting one of Online.NET's 30 euro nodes and using the Object Store from Scaleway. That is the only part of this announcement that appeals to me, tbh. .02 euro per GB for premium Bandwidth + data storage. Compared to S3 Europe that is ridiculously good if you can eat the slightly higher latency.

ddorian43 12y ago
Compare the s3 alternative with runabove: https://www.runabove.com/storage/object-storage.xml https://www.runabove.com/storage/object-storage.xml
- fweespeech 12y ago
  Tbh, the latency I've seen with RunAbove is worse and at .02 Euros per GB...we are talking $20 vs. $10 per Terabyte of bandwidth.

codexon 12y ago

Kimsufi seems to be continually out of stock for the past year if you haven't noticed.