Comment by 015a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 015a | Hacker News Reader

This is the biggest use-case for ARM on the short-term, and it isn't close.

Lambdas are small, isolated, stateless, and highly abstract. All of these things mean, most users will probably just change one line, and immediately see a 20-40% cost reduction.

Practically speaking, there is no reason for x86 lambdas to exist anymore (outside of, "we ship a go binary compiled to x86, need to change one line in the CI to compile to ARM, ok done").

More broadly speaking; as I type this on an M1 Macbook Air, a device with no fan, capable of matching the single-core performance of the brand new i7 11700KF and Ryzen 7 5900x, talking about how new AWS ARM processors will reduce lambda costs by up-to 40% while increasing performance by 20% over x86... we need consumer ARM chips, and we need broader non-Mac desktop application support. Seems like the writing is on the wall, and developers can either keep up with the curve or be left behind.

Right now, very specifically: Looking at you Autodesk. We're coming up on a year of M1. Where's the non-Rosetta release of, say, Fusion 360?

ARM is cheaper on AWS per the unit of work done, in the general case. But there should be no assumption that ARM is that snappy little brother that will launch your lambdas in no time while x86 is still starting up, this is the kind of idea that I get when reading the comments mentioning ARM. It won’t launch your virtualized environment that noticeably faster. It’ll just do more work for less money, and 40% is probably not the figure that you’ll see in real life.

I don't think it will have any affect on Lambda's, but with TeamCity spinning up cloud agents. A t3.medium instance with Ubuntu takes about 1m 20s to begin a build from starting. The t4g.medium with Ubuntu takes around 37 seconds.

The latency reduction might be worth more than the money saved on AWS, is what I’m thinking.

>and 40% is probably not the figure that you’ll see in real life.

There are lots of companies running on Graviton 2 seeing more or less that kind of cost reduction with the switch. Including Twitter. To the point AWS are currently not meeting demands for those instances.

Not every workload will benefits, but it certainly isn't a niche market.

Let's be fair here, AWS in general is fairly expensive. So is it really a surprise that customers are clamoring to use a reduced priced (while equally performant) offering?

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