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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

> ...in 2018, AWS outperformed GCP by 40%, which we attributed to AWS’s Nitro System present in c5 and m5 series... In 2020, we see a return to similar overall performance in each cloud.

How did GCP and Azure catch-up to AWS Nitro in one year which IIRC is a coming together of minimalistic micro-vms, hardware-accelerated network and IO cards, hardware offload for encryption and other maintenance tasks... a work that was 5 years in the making [0]?

[0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/rUY-00yFlE4?t=1m45s

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Meltdown and Spectre did a real number on the c5 and m5 instance types.

Amazon's original fix reduced performance substantially, which lot's of people noticed, but no one knew why till the vulnerabilities were announced.

Meanwhile Google built a clever workaround which minimized the pain. It was really a mic-drop moment from Google and I wish someone would dig in deep and tell the whole story.

At this point I'm sure AWS has merged Google's patches, but it showed how much Google was investing in their GCP offerings.

Interesting! Do you know of any resource where I can read more about this?

There was a few interesting bits in a post the other days about their new compute VM class, #4 in particular https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/understanding... Its pretty light on details but was news to me.

This is not related to Spectre/Meltdown, which was over a year ago.

The tech is called Retpoline, and this blog has some pointers: https://www.blog.google/topics/google-cloud/protecting-our-g...

It is less to do with Google investing in GCP offerings than their investment in general in Operating Systems and their sheer quality of engineers.

Which I am sure will also work at Amazon or have worked at Amazon.

Maybe

Unlikely.

> GCP’s network looks much better than either AWS or Azure’s networks.
> Not only do their top performing machines beat each network’s top performing machines, but, so to do their bottom performing machines. Even their least performant machine (n1-highcpu-16 in figure 10) is consistent with AWS’ maximum network throughput as seen in our tests.

> This is especially impressive because last year, AWS outperformed GCP in our network tests. It is a credit to GCP that they have improved their network performance and we are left wondering exactly how they accomplished this improvement.

It's more likely that all of them started working on it at about the same time and AWS came out first.

The writeup states that their observation is that compute perf is the biggest factor in the TCP-C benchmark. Nitro AFAIU is mainly about networking.

I think all the clouds use the same basic physical CPU sets, so I'm more surprised about the perf being much different in previous years, than I am about the perf being similar this year. Maybe the hypervisor layer was much more efficient at AWS or something?

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