Also, AFAIR they were around the same price of X86 instances.
But then again, I have almost no sysadmin skills, so maybe it was my lack of knowledge.
ARM binaries available? Great. You're all set. (hopefully its for the right generation of ARM though, I can't get SteamLink software to run on my pinebook because it does raspberry pi hardware version checks that obviously fail).
Not available? You're gonna run into one of two scenarios:
Closed source app? Sorry. Just never going to get it (unless you want to run it through qemu at a huge performance hit and YMMV).
Open source app? Compile it yourself! Which takes noticeably longer than x86 for me. Maybe in server this works out. For desktop, compiling st myself was actually the path of least resistance to getting a terminal I liked. I wouldn't have wanted to compile firefox on ARM though without some serious server horsepower. When I used to build docker images they would sometimes take hours, for things that were less than a minute on x86.
Heh, it's funny, right? I switched from an x86 server to an arm server and now it takes seconds and seconds to log me in using ssh. It's like the server really struggles when crunching numbers.
but i could run the entire pi cluster off a 6 port phone charger, instead of an 800w power supply. Power bill was one of my driving motivators. but ultimately i went back to x86 for performance
That is almost certainly because it was pulling a majority of prebuilt binaries, IIUC.
It was massively cheaper than their x86 counterparts at Scaleway or competitors, thanks in no small parts to very clever electrical engineering by my colleagues.
I think we never publicly disclosed power consumption levels but.... let's say our ARM boards are very power efficient :)
ARMv7 as a physical server. No virtualization. Very low performance, very cheap. Good for running your personal web server or similar, but not for anything seeing load. Looks they have not maintained the kernel for more than a year. They let it die, would be my guess.
ARMv8. A virtualized platform. I have not evaluated it myself yet.