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Comment by mduggles | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been migrating workloads away from x86 and towards ARM on AWS and GCP since they’ve been available. This review does a great job of kinda giving you an idea of what you are gonna get as a platform, but if you are interested I strongly recommend the experience on any cloud provider.

While there was some work to benchmark and validate, the cost savings have been non-trivial. Plus this change happened as we were all switching to the M series Macs so ironically now our entire chain end to end is off x86.

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For us it was driven in the other direction. With the introduction of the M1s we knew that we’d be on arm locally soon enough. There was a bit of work in the transition but things have improved since then. Definitely happy running on all arm now though.

I just refer to ARM Lambda runners as a free 20% discount since it makes absolutely no difference in runtime but costs less.

I'd also run ARM database instances but I think those are still not really that readily available.

Alas all my stuff is in Azure, and I'm still waiting for them to offer smaller VM sizes comparable to their existing B line. I currently use a B1s (1 CPU 1GiB) that comes to ~$5/mo while the cheapest ARM VM would be ~$25/mo (2 CPU 4GiB).

I was keen on migrating to ARM, but there seems to be no benefits from doing so on GCP; I'm open to be wrong here.

From what I understand they're using Ampere Altra, which have single thread performance similar to Skylake; but the cost is equivelant or worse than the x86 e2 series.

e2-standard-4: USD 97.84/mo

t2a-standard-4: USD 112.42/mo

(sustained use discounts apply to neither).

EDIT: I see you're in Denmark and are operations focused. I am too operations focused and just across the bridge in Malmö, maybe we could hang out.

The real hidden gems of GCP are the 90% off spot instances in a lot of regions for e.g. N2D.

ARM makes 0 sense on GCP if you can use those.

Yeah sorry I should have been more clear. Currently the ARM instances in GCP when you use them as spot basically never get interrupted. We’re big into GKE so use them as a preferred node group for interruptible pods. I assume due to the pricing you mentioned usage is very low.

So basically any background jobs or big batch processing jobs that required a lot of CPU time. We have multi-arch container builds so if we can’t scale out the ARM node group not a problem, go back to x86. But it was worth the optimizing to get effectively always available spot instances.

Yeah always open to meet up with folks. I’m on mastodon at matdevdug@c.im.

T2A vCPUs are full cores though right? While E2 and most other instances are hyperthreads.

Actually I’m in Sweden. Of course we could hang out in sometime. Just cross the bridge. Here’s my email emeries-atolls.0w@icloud.com

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