[HN Gopher] Google Kubernetes Engine adds support for Arm nodes
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Google Kubernetes Engine adds support for Arm nodes
Author : crb
Score : 96 points
Date : 2022-07-13 16:59 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cloud.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cloud.google.com)
| Aissen wrote:
| Pricing is in line with the cloud: expensive. That's it, they
| made it: now Arm servers are mainstream.
| runlevel1 wrote:
| Dell and HP are still nowhere to be seen in the on-prem Arm
| server market. Is there not enough of a cost advantage for
| there to be demand?
| mathnode wrote:
| I am very ignorant of the current ARM cloud offerings. Is it
| similar prices but less power usage? Or have they had to ramp
| up the watts to compete?
| justizin wrote:
| 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.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > the notion, "the cloud is expensive", ignores the fact
| that the cloud is not just rented hardware, but staff,
| facilities, planning, management, etc..
|
| Not at all. Any organization that runs its datacenters can
| calculate a TCO.
|
| It's really business 101.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| > you cannot easily source arm hardware commercially
|
| Buy Mac Minis and run virtual linux inside?
| api wrote:
| You can (in theory) run Linux straight on Apple Silicon.
| It's not locked like the iPad and iPhone. The M1 Ultra
| would be a pretty solid high volume server if you can
| manage to plug a 10-40gbps LAN dongle into it. I believe
| USB-C and/or thunderbolt connectors like that exist.
|
| In theory so far because I'm not sure if there are mature
| installers and such yet.
| dochtman wrote:
| The Asahi Linux installer worked flawlessly on my MacBook
| Pro M1 Max, though it asks you to do some low level
| things like repartitioning the drive.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I've been passively curious about this for a homelab--
| does linux virtualize on apple silicon today? I was of
| the impression this didn't work when they announced m1 in
| 2020, but I could be misremembering.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Absolutely. It worked from day one. There are issues with
| emulating x86 Linux, but that's a different story. For
| ARM Linux -- just ordinary qemu works fine.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Oh, interesting. That's great to hear!
| jonatron wrote:
| I always found the CPU pricing of cloud to be relatively
| reasonable. It's everything else that's expensive, and egress
| bandwidth just ridiculous.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| 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
| api wrote:
| 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.
| Klasiaster wrote:
| It's quite light on details: What properties does the
| (virtualized) ARM CPU that one gets have? Can it do KVM itself
| (meaning the underlying real CPU has support for nested KVM)? Can
| it do ARMv8.3 pointer authentication?
| my123 wrote:
| It's an Ampere Altra for those first instances. So no on both.
| Klasiaster wrote:
| 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.
| milesward wrote:
| They did in the docs, 2nd paragraph of the blog post, etc
|
| https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/tau-t2a-is-
| fi...
| Klasiaster wrote:
| Thanks, yes, makes sense to look at the GCE announcement
| instead of the GKE announcement for this info.
| bogomipz wrote:
| I'd be curious to hear what the use case is for nested KVM.
| What hardware support is required for that as well?
| vocram wrote:
| The instance exposed by GCE is virtualized. If you want to
| run any hw virtualized workload inside it, you need nested
| virtualization.
| bogomipz wrote:
| I'd be curious to hear about your Kubernetes workloads.
| Generally the reason people run VMs with Kubernetes is for
| security. If GKE is providing you with a Kubernetes worker
| node that is running in an ARM VM why would you not just
| run a regular pod on it?
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| Great. Hopefully Azure is next, so we can get ARM Github Actions
| runners on which I can build ARM binaries. I can already do it
| with qemu-user but it's slow.
| cagataygurturk wrote:
| You can already self-host GH Runners on ARM.
| jrockway wrote:
| 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.)
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| 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.
| wmf wrote:
| People would probably be more interested in the underlying Google
| Cloud ARM announcement:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32084887
| milesward wrote:
| Yup, my team did a little copy-paste lab if folks want to kick
| the tires: https://github.com/sadasystems/gke-multiarch-guide
| Cidan wrote:
| 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 :)
| markdog12 wrote:
| Looks like it's only available in NA central for now, boooo:
| https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones#availabl...
| milesward wrote:
| Where did you want it?
| BillinghamJ wrote:
| In every zone, obviously. AWS has had widespread ARM support
| for many years.
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