Hacker News Reader

Comment by nextzuckerberg | Hacker News Reader

What differentiates these from dedicated boxes in server rack? Is their dedicated "cloud" hardware somehow managing access to RAM/storage/etc?

On another tangent - how do Google Cloud and EC2 attach GPUs to instances - given that you can choose CPU and RAM the GPUs must somehow be modularized away from a dedicated server?

View on HN

You can provision these servers just like any other instance. They work just like any other Amazon EC2 instance (same Nitro System platform as C5).

Disclaimer: I work at AWS on the team responsible for the Nitro System including EC2 Bare Metal Instances.

is there any information about nitro or ENA (assuming this is the "hardware accelerators" that are mentioned in tfa) that is publicly available? it seems like the most nifty little thing

Here are videos from break out sessions yesterday at re:Invent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabltEXk0VQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9_4uGvbvnk

There is more coming at re:Invent. We have more talks queued up tomorrow on this too.

I'll keep an eye out, thanks

how many NICs can you attach to these?

15 Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) can be attached, just like i3.16xlarge.

Any idea if TPM is available on the bare metal instances?

> how do Google Cloud and EC2 attach GPUs to instances - given that you can choose CPU and RAM the GPUs must somehow be modularized away from a dedicated server?

Rack A of servers has a base_server_x. Rack B of servers is base_server_x + GPU_Y.

You ask for no GPU, you get a server from rack A. You ask for a GPU, you get a server from rack B.

No magic monkey adding GPUs to instances ;)

Oh there's magic monkeys too!: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/elastic-gpus/

They can exist in a VPC alongside virtualized resources, map EBS volumes (due to having the ENA onboard), are integrated with cloudwatch, ebs, etc

I assume you can spin up new instances easily, and they’ll have per-hour billing. You don’t usually get that with dedicated servers.

It sounds a bit like MAAS [1], which allows you to throw images onto, and manage real servers easily, very much like you might spin up VMs on AWS.

[1] https://maas.io

These are billed the same as any other EC2 instance: per second.

Just to point out, per second billing is incredibly recent for EC2:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/10/announcin...

Network and other managed services those are integrated into AWS.

So you could magic up a virtual machine that spans more hardware than would typically be in a single, enclosed chassis?

No, that isn't possible for VMs or bare metal.

Actually, it is possible, but not on Amazon's cloud. Check out www.scalemp.com - aggregating a collection of nodes into a large, single VM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com