[mduggles]

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.

[aidos]

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.

[Hamuko]

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.

[Arnavion]

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).

[dijit]

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.

[mduggles]

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 [e-mail].

[re-thc]

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.

[johncolanduoni]

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

[bennythink]

Actually I’m in Sweden. Of course we could hang out in sometime. Just cross the bridge. Here’s my email [e-mail]