Google Kubernetes Engine adds support for Arm nodes

Also, the PM's are going to do an AMA for this on reddit tomorrow:

https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/vy8hx3/ama_wit...

Come join us! Also, hi Moles :)

The point is to not have to self-host. It costs money, is a pain because maintenance is required, and there are security issues with running CI for public pull requests.

What kind of ARM machine should I buy if I want to self-host an ARM server? My not-that-recent look at the market shows everyone kind of doing their own thing; Amazon makes Amazon's ARM servers, Apple makes Apple's ARM chips, etc. As some random guy who wants to test on ARM, it's annoying. Maybe things have improved recently, though?

(I'm guessing self-host realistically means "get a VM on AWS", which is probably fine for CI if you already use AWS. A little annoying to have another monthly bill to pay if you don't, though.)

In every zone, obviously. AWS has had widespread ARM support for many years.

They could have named Ampere and give credit to them, I think it's common in cloud instance offerings to have AMD or Intel also being named as underlying physical CPUs, even with the generation.

The instance exposed by GCE is virtualized. If you want to run any hw virtualized workload inside it, you need nested virtualization.

not sure about pricing here, but graviton on aws has generally offered more performance at a lower price point, which is likely linked to lower power usage and perhaps lower cost of custom silicon vs intel.

the notion, "the cloud is expensive", ignores the fact that the cloud is not just rented hardware, but staff, facilities, planning, management, etc..

there are businesses where it makes more sense to own hardware and employ your own staff, but if you just want generic compute and storage, you're unlikely to do it as well for less.

also you cannot easily source arm hardware commercially, there is the honeycomb lx2, and its' lead time is months for a single unit. if you want hundreds of nodes, you're gonna use a cloud provider who manufactures their own silicon.

Meh cpus/ram most likely have lighter margins for cloud vendors compared to storage and bandwidth (which is just ridiculous) but they have to keep a lot of spare capacity for scaling so if you don’t scale by much you can do way better on metal even on cpus

Typical cloud bandwidth pricing is known as "roach motel pricing" after the old roach motel pest control slogan of "roaches check in but they never check out." The idea is to make ingress free but egress expensive to make it easy to move all your data in but costly and hard to move it out.

I've done some cost analyses between our AWS and DC infrastructure.

To come up with our on-prem compute costs, we baked in the cost of power, real estate, staff, taxes, network infrastructure, servers (both in-use and in reserve), etc. On the AWS side, we used 3 year RIs and Savings Plan. After all that, there was around a 30% cost advantage on-prem. That's non-trivial, but not as big as one might think.

Outbound networking, however, is ludicrously cheaper on-prem. It's about 85% cheaper on-prem than in AWS. Bandwidth is not expensive outside the public cloud.

In fact, egress volume is the #1 cost driver for us moving a service on-prem or building it there to begin with. Some of the AWS managed services are also very pricey, but nowhere near the egregious markup of egress bandwidth.