New EC2 Instance Types of re:Invent 2021
aws-native.com
aws-native.com
I remember the first AMD instances a few years back and the 10% price/performance was nice, but at the same time didn’t feel like it would convince enterprise users to switch. Now with Graviton2&3, they’re apparently at 30-40% advantage and any big user would be crazy not to explore moving workloads over.
I expect the Intel-AWS negotiations today are _very_ different vs 5 years ago. This new naming is just one of many signals of a further downhill trend to Intel, and it’s likely to gain momentum in the next few years as the experience and ecosystem around ARM grows.
If there are custom instructions added, AWS customers aren't aware of them. Feature set pretty much unchanged too. It's a non-effect on that front.
Also the field is not static. Amazon does a lot of lobbying. Let's imagine you can check a certain legal compliance box simply by running on graviton.
Or the next industry trend which might be funded and hyped by AWS requires a specific feature for isolation that only really works on graviton.
a1/32gb/16vcpu (early graviton) @ 8c and
M5zn/48gb/12vcpu (late Intel) @ 12c
I think the intel is better value. What are those graviton instances with better value (given that they are probably much slower than Intel)?
Intel instances are significantly more expensive when considering the cost for performance. In fact it's not even close [0].
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...
The key part being the cheapest available Graviton and Intel spot instances:
a1/32gb/16vcpu (early graviton) @ 8c and
versus:
M5zn/48gb/12vcpu (late Intel) @ 12c
Perhaps that will change as Graviton ages and availability changes.
Fair enough - I was trying to provide some data showing that Graviton is on par and exceeds cost/performance value in some cases.
> Perhaps that will change as Graviton ages and availability changes.
Graviton isn't standing still - AWS bought Annapura labs in 2015, so while older versions of Graviton will obviously shift left in terms of it's value, AWS is going to continue to push in that direction. Graviton 3 was recently announced [0].
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/amazon-ec...
My framework runs a fairly simple pipeline: for each 1GB file, stream it from S3, decompress it, search it with a regex library, stream results back to S3.
A1 spot instances have consistently been cheaper for this task when measured on a $/GB scanned basis. Part of this might be that the framework doesn't need lots of RAM, so paying for more than 2GB per core on the non-A1 instances is just wasted expense for me.
Lambdas can be cost effective for bursty loads, but if you can push sustained CPU utilization, as this example does, EC2 is cheaper.
For example, an ARM-based Lambda with 2 GB of RAM running for 1 hour is $0.09. An a1.medium is $0.025/hr on-demand or $0.0084/hr spot.
Part of this is that Lambda scales your CPU performance with your memory usage. So even if your code can run in 128 MB of RAM, there's no cost benefit to you if it's CPU-constrained, because it will run 16x slower than if you allocated it 2048 MB of RAM.
I assume you mean cost / performance as in Cost to amazon and not price as in price paid by consumers? Because Graviton is both faster and cheaper per vCPU. ( Amazon unit for a single thread )
>AWS taking a short term margin hit
It is hard because even if you can reliably extrapolate the cost of Graviton chip by wafer price. You will never know how they put the R&D into accounting. Do you have NRE cost in every single one those chips? ( which is what most people assume but not necessarily true ) Or do you move the whole R&D of Graviton into whole AWS R&D budget? And then you will have to calculate the power usage per workload to work out the power saving which gives you the TCO. Since 30%+ of Operating cost are going to energy usage. Being power efficient is also extremely important at the scale of AWS.
All in all I do not believe that Amazon is takin a short term margin hit ( and I dont understand where this narrative came from ), it is cheaper to produce, it uses less energy, and Amazon is pricing it as such, slightly cheaper than Intel and AMD's counterpart. Just like they did with the first generation of ARM. Graviton actually being faster per core just happens to be a bonus.
One has to remember. Moving to ARM / Graviton instances isn't free. You have to do your own testing and benchmarks to make sure it is indeed faster for your Apps. And that isn't always the case. You also have to make sure every part of your stack compile and works 100% on ARM. It just happens the cost saving is so gigantic lots of companies are spending time to move, which create a positive feedback loop in both open source and proprietary software to move towards ARM.
The paranoid might suggest it is coming from Intel's PR team, who might want AWS customers to believe that the savings might not be sustainable.
This would only make sense if Intel and AMD are still the dominant platform for Amazon. But in reality nearly 50% of all new EC2 instances built on are Graviton, and they are only limited by TSMC capacity. ( Or more like Amazon inability to predict the Graviton demand ) in another year or two this could close down to 70-80%. Last time I heard this pace is two years ahead of their internal estimate and schedule. And most of these deals were signed years before, i.e Amazon are still enjoying discounts while producing Graviton. So I dont think discount from Intel and AMD factor much into those decisions. If Intel no longer give discount AWS just purchase more from AMD. Amazon has all the cards in these deals. Not Intel or AMD.
Not even that any more.
From the article: "A key highlight is that M6a instances are SAP certified"
If you’re going to compare the paper performance of an unreleased machine to a 3-year-old Intel machine then yeah probably the former will win.
I can confirm that:
Build time of a Linux 5.13.11 kernel with `make defconfig all`
c6i.32xlarge: 24.871411s
m6a.48xlarge: 27.622526s
Build time of a Linux 5.13.11 kernel with `make allmodconfig all`
c6i.32xlarge: 183.775255s
m6a.48xlarge: 205.326048s
128-way Intel seems to consistently beat 196-way AMD for software builds.
I didn't mean to pick sides, or suggest anyone picks graviton by default. I meant to comment on how the communication around these new architectures by AWS has shifted, and what - I think - it signals about Intel's current and future market position with AWS.
For reference, my stuff runs on Heroku, I'm clearly not that concerned about price/performance ;)
I'm running in-house go services that consume from kinesis streams, so nothing strange like SAP.
Does anyone know any browser extension for instance to place information inline, such as specs and monthly/yearly pricing?
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...
The official docs literally tell you to manually search the file in a text editor.
I found the upfront pricing of DigitalOcean very refreshing after AWS.
Is there something missing from these? Admittedly they can be a bit hard to find sometimes but I think that's a problem with AWS docs in general
Is this the case? I can't even find cloudflare's egress pricing online AT ALL. With AWS I can find pricing for anything I want.
Is there a specific instance price that you are trying to find and can't, you may be able to post here and someone can help you. The prices are on the AWS site, and also exposed via API's so there are a ton of third party services for them as well.
I wasn't aware that AWS had set up pricing "mostly to make it easy for developers to waste the company's budget". If you need help saving money AWS offers some services for this directly and again third parties can help you if you are struggling.
Cloudflare charges $0 for egress for the main service as long as it's for serving a website (eg. serving binaries or random other files isn't allowed if it's disproportionate to regular website visitors). for anything else, the pricing pages are usually close by - The Workers[0] site has pricing at the bottom, and R2 will also have $0 in egress pricing[1].
0: https://cloudflare.com/workers
1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/
I've been burned (too many times) by these "free" claims.
Will you absolutely guarantee (and pay me if needed) that I can host a large video website on cloudflare with no egress? This will be in PB not TB.
What I have found is that these sites with "free" are inevitably scams, that the types of loads that actually need high traffic egress result in that middle of the night email to squeeze you into some high cost plan (which does in fact have an egress price).
That said, if you will cover overage charges - I'll spin up a website on cloudflare. Do you understand bandwidth needs of video hosting sites? I'm sure porn sites are in 10-15PB per day range (ie, > 300PB/month).
Your website can be anything you want, but if CF bandwidth usage gonna be 99% for videos, you're not using it to serve the website, you're distributing content.
Which is not the use case they're servicing (with their "CDN" service)
They have a new service for that: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/
Which may be expensive too or difficult to compare (they bill per minute/instead of data)
For huge volumes, it's certainly better to find "specialized" providers or budget options like bunny.net
I run a video website on AWS, no one cares what I am doing, they charge me and done. I distribute software updates, no one complains, they charge me and done.
I run a video website on cloudflare, they say, oh, you are not running a website, you are distributing content, that's against the rules. Similarly if I host my software, my software updates, my management layer with firmware update service etc. Heads ups, when I visit these sites, for most normal people I am visiting a website.
Do folks not realize when they keep on repeating that egress is "free" on cloudflare that is a total lie? Hello, it's not free. You will get a call and they will squeeze you.
The streaming product is useful finally because we have at least a rough idea of price. Youtube avg video is 700MB/hr or so (mobile video is huge these days). That get's us to about 9 cents per GB.
Interestingly, this was I think the egress pricing they had for workers back when they were public about it.
AWS is 5 to 9 cents as well depending on usage so same range.
AWS Cloudfront is 2 cents to 9 cents depending on usage.
OK, so we are within the normal range of things now with egress pricing.
In my own experience with this type of player, you still get the call if you optimize for their pricing (ie, you run your 4K content through them, and your other content via another platform) because despite their claims bandwidth is "free" they are actually losing money on it, and if you use enough of this "free" stuff their marketing budget can't handle it and they just shut you down.
It's just not worth dealing with.
You'll know Cloudflare has a competitive CDN offering when they are willing to give you the pricing publicly of providing a CDN service that can handle any type of content. That is the proof point.
Cloudflare does have Argo which I think runs in that 5 to 9 cent range again per GB.
Back to the claim that AWS has hidden pricing (especially relative to cloudflare). I still find that ridiculous. Cloudlfare seems to be a heavily marketing based org with very hidden pricing (everything is call for a quote). Does anyone know what % of expense cloudflare has in marketing / selling? I'd imagine pretty damn high.
Cloudflare can offer free bandwidth to a whole host of sites and still have "a competitive CDN offering" without giving away free video hosting, arguably one of the most expensive use-cases to support.
But what, again, is the pricing of cloudflare's "competitive CDN offering"? That seriously all I am asking for.
If you are going to go on about pricing (cloudflare does) have the courtesy to list yours publicly and don't have gag orders in your agreements.
The context of all of this is Amazon supposedly obfuscating their pricing to waste budgets. With cloudflare, you can't even FIND their pricing and will need to talk with a salesperson.
Anyways, for those stumbling around with this, minimum I've heard cloudflare doing is $24K per year on their paid stuff, and then they added Argo at around 10 cents per GB in the pay as you go offerings. Cloudfront is 2 to 9 cents per GB, google 2 to 10, fastly is around 8 to 12 cents, keycdn 4 cents etc. Not claiming AWS or Google are the cheapest, but pricing is pretty darn upfront.
Also have heard of folks getting busted by cloudflare if too many folks in asia/non-USA use the service, this seems far fetched, but AWS does charge differently by geo area so not sure if cloudflare has some rules like that tucked away.
But it works fine for 95% of customers :)
If you're moving volumes of course you should look into detail and consider the most adequate option.
The best I've found - run the workload you actually plan on running. Even on AWS etc, the perf differences are getting pretty meaningful between instance families even at similar price points.