[HN Gopher] New EC2 Instance Types of re:Invent 2021
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New EC2 Instance Types of re:Invent 2021
Author : adriaandj
Score : 111 points
Date : 2021-12-05 11:30 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aws-native.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (aws-native.com)
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I mainly use TensorFlow on AWS, with or without GPUs. I would
| like to read a reference for Gravitron, etc. support for
| TensorFlow.
| unixhero wrote:
| Watching reinvent on YouTube has been very profitable for my
| consulting offerings. Thanks AWS!
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Googling "AWS EC2 benchmark" leads to nowhere. Does anyone have a
| good source of objective instance comparison between cloud
| providers? I went off one day and created instances on AWS, GCP
| and DO - and ran Geekbench5 (yes I know it's not a professional
| benchmarking tool but better than nothing I suppose) and found
| large differences. DO was the slowest of all. Do most companies
| do their own due-diligence before committing large sums of money
| into AWS?
| wilde wrote:
| I've been using https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/ but haven't done
| much in the way of independently confirming their rankings.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Digital Ocean is really serving a different market. The folks
| recommending them tend to be running smaller workloads (so DO
| can have relative lower perf per vCPU etc).
|
| 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.
| gatestone wrote:
| If you use the Amazon Kubernetes service or similar at Google or
| Azure (EKS, GKE, AKS) you can pretty much let them manage your
| VMs. With Terraform it's a breeze, start with the defaults and
| try different setups.
| mihaic wrote:
| A bit tangential, but I've always hated how opaque AWS makes the
| process of picking instance types, since they hide the specs and
| prices behind layers of complexity, mostly to make it easy for
| developers to waste the company's budget.
|
| Does anyone know any browser extension for instance to place
| information inline, such as specs and monthly/yearly pricing?
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| If you have the option, you can also vote with your wallet and
| go somewhere else.
|
| I found the upfront pricing of DigitalOcean very refreshing
| after AWS.
| nijave wrote:
| Types https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ Prices
| https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/
|
| 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
| big-malloc wrote:
| I gave up on the official site and now use https://ec2.shop --
| really nice for doing a quick price comparison
| slownews45 wrote:
| Most of these third parties are using official API's to get
| pricing data, if there is something with a hidden price do
| ask and someone can probably help you figure it out. One
| reason AWS got popular is that it actually was historically
| much HARDER to get pricing from your internal IT team /
| vendors like IBM etc. So AWS wasn't the cheapest (by any
| means) but was pretty clear on cost. So it's interesting to
| hear that AWS is purposely hiding pricing and making price
| complicated to "waste company's budgets".
| [deleted]
| slownews45 wrote:
| "mostly to make it easy for developers to waste the company's
| budget."
|
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > cloudflare's egress pricing online AT ALL.
|
| 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/
| slownews45 wrote:
| The reason people need / use high egress (ie, far above the
| 1TB etc AWS gives per month) is for things like video
| sites, software updates / distribution etc.
|
| 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).
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| it's not about the website content, it's about the
| content served from Cloudflare network.
|
| 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
| slownews45 wrote:
| Umm, this is what is such a gimmick about these "free"
| services.
|
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Egress pricing is free for certain content. It's not free
| for all content. If i'm a fast food joint and offer free
| meals to veterans, I can do that, even if some customers
| complain that i'm not running a soup kitchen where
| everyone eats free.
|
| 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.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Sure. Cloudflare can give away free services as a
| marketing effort. AWS gives away 1TB/month of cloudfront
| bandwidth, 1 million lambda calls per month, 1 million
| SNS notification per month, 25GB of DynamoDB capacity, 1
| million Simple Queue queries per month and plenty more.
| So does google.
|
| 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.
| stillicidious wrote:
| It's by design, many features of EC2 are unrelated to the chip
| itself. For example burstable scheduling, availability of
| enclaves, IO and networking bandwidth and a variety hypervisor
| features are all tied to the instance family. These are often
| far more important to a buildout than the exact chip you're
| running on
| storyinmemo wrote:
| Not inline, but https://instances.vantage.sh/ is the way I've
| been looking at it for 5+ years.
| belter wrote:
| In case anybody is curious, this is done with the AWS Pricing
| API:
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2.
| ..
| fs111 wrote:
| The pricing api is so weird. It basically downloads a CSV
| file and serves that up through code. Also none of the
| names in there match anything else in the AWS nomenclature.
| It talks about SKUs and in general feels like somebody
| leaked an internal API by accident.
|
| The official docs literally tell you to manually search the
| file in a text editor.
| hectormalot wrote:
| The specific designation of Intel with the 'i' suffix is
| interesting. I'm surprised how fast this went from "everything is
| Intel" to "only take intel if you need something like SAP".
|
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The 6i instances are beating all amd and generally-available
| graviton instances in raw performance and performance-per-
| dollar on my workloads. I don't think you'll be well-served
| carrying this mental bias around. Better to actually try it and
| find out.
|
| 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.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > The 6i instances are beating all amd and generally-
| available graviton instances in raw performance and
| performance-per-dollar on my workloads.
|
| 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.
| hectormalot wrote:
| > I don't think you'll be well-served carrying this mental
| bias around.
|
| 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 ;)
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| > only take intel if you need something like SAP
|
| Not even that any more.
|
| From the article: "A key highlight is that M6a instances are
| SAP certified"
| twoodfin wrote:
| I've been curious for a while: Has anyone done the envelope
| math to estimate how much of the Graviton price advantage
| offered by AWS is a reflection of true price/performance vs.
| AWS taking a short term margin hit to encourage growth of a CPU
| platform they control?
| nielsole wrote:
| Custom instructions / features that are only available on AWS
| silicon will improve their vendor lock-in. And thus would
| warrant short term price dumping. Future cost/performance
| improvements will allow them to raise their margin. Kind of
| worried what that will mean for the portability of software
| long-term.
| my123 wrote:
| > Custom instructions / features that are only available on
| AWS silicon
|
| 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.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Are you 'locked in' to intel because of AVX? The cost of
| moving is recompiling your binary.
| ant6n wrote:
| Currently the cheapest spot instances with >30gb are
|
| 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)?
| hedgehog wrote:
| It seems unclear, the Intel has fewer cores (6 vs A1's 8)
| and probably less memory bandwidth per core, but then each
| core would be faster than the Graviton1. You'd need to
| benchmark your specific workload to find out.
| cldellow wrote:
| The a1.4xlarge has 16 cores, not 8. One of the sales
| pitches of the Graviton is that it has no SMT, so you get
| more predictable per-core performance.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Oops, yes, it's 16 cores vs 6.
| windexh8er wrote:
| > 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...
| ant6n wrote:
| Mmh. Based on that Anandtech article, I guess the
| graviton2 cpus are actually similar in performance to
| intel ones. But still, my spot instance searches
| (especially also taking into account interruption
| frequencies), prices seem a bit of a wash. It doesn't
| look like Graviton is 40% cheaper. This may be different
| for on-demand or reserved pricing.
| tyingq wrote:
| The parent seemed to be specifically calling out Intel
| spot instances.
|
| 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.
| cldellow wrote:
| I wrote a framework that does regexes of the Common Crawl.
| The Common Crawl is a series of captures of billions of
| pages of the WWW. Each member in the series has ~60 TB
| captures.
|
| 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.
| wmf wrote:
| There's no way to know what price AWS pays for any processor.
| Having said that, it looks like ARM server processors do have
| an area efficiency advantage over Intel/AMD.
| lizthegrey wrote:
| Intel charges a much larger markup per chip than AWS can get
| from their own silicon + licensing ARM IP; the power
| consumption of Intel chips is also terrible (it's been cited
| that it's 60% lower power consumption for c7g instances
| compared to c6i instances, for instance, in the latest
| reinvent talk...) -- and power is what predominates operating
| cost day to day once the chip is fabbed/installed.
| ksec wrote:
| > by AWS is a reflection of true price/performance
|
| 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.
| xmodem wrote:
| > and I dont understand where this narrative came from
|
| 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.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| That really surprising. I switch our workloads from m5 to m5a
| and there was a noticeable drop in performance and increase in
| latency.
|
| I'm running in-house go services that consume from kinesis
| streams, so nothing strange like SAP.
| soheil wrote:
| Gravitons haven't been discovered yet, if they do exist they're
| probably as difficult to find as their counterpart AWS instances.
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