AWS C4 Instances

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/?sc_ichannel=em&sc_icountry=global&sc_icampaigntype=launch&sc_icampaign=em_130722160&sc_idetail=em_865952340&ref_=pe_411040_130722160_17#compute-optimized

by kapkapkap • 12 years ago

50 68 12 years ago

aws.amazon.com

pantulis2• 12 years ago

What does "optimized specifically for EC2" means?

pantulis2• 12 years ago

Never mind, this must be it: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/13/amazons_new_ec2_comp...

mattzito• 12 years ago

There was another article that suggested they were manufactured specifically to amazon's standards for things like cooling and power stability. Instead of having to run in a wide range of environments, they can be designed to run in just the narrow range of Amazon's environment.

ejdyksen• 12 years ago

Here's the chip in question (Intel Xeon E5-2666):

http://ark.intel.com/products/81706

I don't think anyone but Amazon has this specific model. I don't see it available for sale anywhere.

api3• 12 years ago

Interesting trend. If you could spec out the whole thing including cooling for use in a data center, you could probably do some really damn fast many-core chips that wouldn't be likely to sell much in the desktop and a la carte server markets.

th0br0• 12 years ago

see http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/11/13/intel...

matthewrudy2• 12 years ago

It's interesting that this new generation has moved away from onboard ssds.

The extra features of EBS SSDs are pretty useful (ie. snapshotting)

But having attached disks was super fast.

makmanalp• 12 years ago

I'm considering switching to these from C3 and it would be interesting to see hdparm outputs / etc on these if anyone is going to try them.

pwarner2• 12 years ago

I presume they will add storage optimized instances with local disks in the future?

matthewrudy2• 12 years ago

I guess so.

Last time we spec-ed up an ElasticSearch cluster the SSD EBS didn't exist yet, so on-board SSDs was an obvious win.

I should revisit it again some time.

eropple6• 12 years ago

I don't care about disk speed nearly as much as I do reliability. EBS combines inconsistency with unreliability. It is the worst of both worlds for building a reliable, redundant infrastructure. I'm pretty bummed.

chisleu• 12 years ago

Onboard SSDs are better for some use cases... high volume queues come to mind.

C3 SSDs were crazy faster than even the fastest EBS option listed, plus you could raid0 them...

Fortunately for me, I don't need that much disk space and C3's aren't going anywhere for a while.

helper3• 12 years ago

Ugh, very disappointed to see these are EBS only.

eropple6• 12 years ago

Agreed, and I think this isn't getting enough play. EBS is one of the more failure-prone parts of the AWS stack. I full-stop don't use EBS, anywhere, on any machine, because of the reliability concerns. (Since I am at least sort of competent, I design for redundancy and don't care if I lose a node anyway, so instance stores are fine.)

These machines sound cool, but C3's will do me just fine.

meltedice5• 12 years ago

EBS disks are far more durable (and convenient with S3 snapshots).

otterley2• 12 years ago

There's no question that what you sacrifice in performance with EBS, you get back in easy durability. But if you design your persistence layer with replicated instances, you can have the performance of instance storage. You'll need to make backups yourself, so it is a bit of extra work over making EBS snapshots, but IMO the performance gains are well worth it.

eropple6• 12 years ago

EBS disks are more durable, sure. When you can reach them. You should be designing for failure, and EBS fails not infrequently relative to the rest of AWS. The problem is, when it fails, your instances go with it.

Individual machines' durability is almost irrelevant. Your service's durability is very relevant. This is the most critical consideration in almost all cases in the cloud. EBS makes service durability much harder.

helper3• 12 years ago

Besides my database servers, all of my machines are ephemeral[1]. I can lose machines and spin up new ones automatically (and therefore scale elastically).

EBS adds an unnecessary additional point of failure that I want to avoid at all costs.

Having run production systems in EC2 since 2010, I've survived numerous EBS outages as other services have crashed and burned by sticking to this philosophy.

[1]: I don't use EBS for my database servers either. I use a replicated DB that can lose multiple machines simultaneously without loss of data (and is backed up to S3 in case of a catastrophic event).

mdeeks• 12 years ago

Ephemeral give you extremely high IOPS for no additional cost. It's perfect if you don't need a ton of disk space. A great example is Graphite. Very high IOPS requirement but (usually) a low disk space requirement (assuming you configure relatively low retention) The c3.2xlarge boxes are great for that.

The equivalent on EBS on the other hand will cost you an extra $250/mo or so in addition to your server cost. And you will cap out at 4000 IOPS.

nissimk• 12 years ago

In case anyone else was wondering what "ability to control P-States and C-States" is about, I think this is a useful reference [1]. I guess with the C4-8Xlarge you control the entire physical machine and you can enable additional P-states to get more power out of the cpu while using more electricity.

[1] http://www.xenserver.org/partners/developing-products-for-xe...

tedunangst2• 12 years ago

That's a strange feature to include on a machine I'm not paying the power or cooling bill for. Why would I ever set it to anything other than 11?

dbarlett• 12 years ago

From https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-new-c4-instan... :

  In some cases, your workload might not need all 18 of the cores (each of which
  runs two hyperthreads, for a total of 36 vCPUs on c4.8xlarge). To tune your
  application for better performance, you can manage the power consumption on a
  per-core basis. This is known as C-state management, and gives you control over
  the sleep level that a core may enter when idle. Let’s say that your code needs
  just two cores. Your operating system can set the other 16 cores to a state that
  draws little or no power, thereby creating some thermal headroom that will give
  the remaining cores an opportunity to Turbo Boost. You also have control over
  the desired performance (CPU clock frequency); this is known as P-state
  management. You should consider changing C-state settings to decrease CPU
  latency variability (cores in a sleep state consume less power, but deeper sleep
  states require longer to become active when needed) and consider changing
  P-state settings to adjust the variability in CPU frequency in order to best
  meet the needs of your application.

idunno246• 12 years ago

They'll raise the clock speed on a single core if it's cool enough iirc, so better single threaded performance

bbgm• 12 years ago

Some additional information on processor state control is available in the docs including some sample scenarioes

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/processor...

pwarner2• 12 years ago

Should we expext R4 (ram optimized) or M4 (balanced) instances soon or is the high cost of DDR4 going to delay things?

I am about to reserve some R3 instances so maybe that will speed it up :-)

api3• 12 years ago

Still damn expensive compared to things like a dedicated server from here:

http://www.kimsufi.com/en/

Amazon seems to offer more network bandwidth though, so they might have an advantage for CPU-heavy and network-heavy loads. But from the testing I've done Amazon comes in almost dead last for cost/performance on most metrics. I suppose they could make sense if you make heavy use of all their services, and maybe their cost/performance improves with scale?

SuperKlaus• 12 years ago

Plus seamless integration with everything else AWS.

click170• 12 years ago

You should be aware though that integrating with AWS services that aren't also provided by AWS' competition, you're increasing the cost of switching away from AWS in the future.

I'm not saying don't do it, I'm just saying be aware that you may be making it harder for your company to change providers down the road.

lflux• 12 years ago

Unfortunately Kimsufi / SoYouStart have a tendency of not always having servers available - either the kind you want or in DC you want.

api3• 12 years ago

True. Those are better if you want to grab a server and sit on it for a long time as a dedicated box at a data center. It's more like old school rack hosting but you don't have to actually screw with hardware. They'd be awful if you want elasticity, which I suppose is why "elastic" is in Amazon's name. Duh. :)

I have some stuff at Kimsufi (BHS data center). The performance and stability are really excellent but I'd have to wait for availability to add more, which sucks.

meltedice5• 12 years ago

Most of the servers on that page aren't even running ECC RAM. The only one listing ECC RAM is the E5504 which dates back to 2009 whereas C4 is running the fastest Xeon model available today. The rest of the list is Intel Atom and i5 and i7 desktop chips. 60% of the server types on that page are also currently out of stock.

lsb2• 12 years ago

Where does EC2 say that they are running with ECC RAM?

moe2• 12 years ago

Pricing still looks pretty far out there.

Their CPU has a passmark score of 16k[1] and they ask $1300 USD/mo for it.

Hetzner will rent you one with passmark 10k[2] for $60/mo...

[1] http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2680+v...

[2] http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-4770+%...

ianlevesque• 12 years ago

AWS is expensive for some definitions of expensive, water is wet.

That is a crazy difference though if you can take advantage of it.

micro-ram• 12 years ago

I would love to leave my colo for AWS but the numbers just don't work.

ddorian43• 12 years ago

you forgot the bandwidth price

meltedice5• 12 years ago

That assumes that there's only one chip in the server (unlikely with 36 vcpus listed for C4), that you're happy with using a desktop chip with no ECC for Hetzner, and your pricing doesn't consider reserved instance pricing for C4 which costs much less than $1300.

latch2• 12 years ago

Though notably more than the quoted $50, for €69, you get a server chip and ECC.

moe2• 12 years ago

The ECC version costs $81/mo at Hetzner.

3 years reserved c4.8xlarge costs $501/mo at EC2.

If you can commit for 3 years, why would you pay a 6x markup for "elasticity"? (11x if you commit for only 1 year...)

lukego• 12 years ago

Is the Enhanced Networking on a C4 instance a Virtual Function (ixgbev driver) or a full Physical Function (ixgbe driver)?

The docs say that it is a VF but I wonder since they are offering the full 10G of bandwidth.

We could relocate our Snabb Lab to AWS if we got PFs. https://github.com/SnabbCo/snabbswitch/wiki/Snabb-Lab

smwht• 12 years ago

It looks like it still loads the ixgbevf driver:

  # ethtool -i eth0
  driver: ixgbevf

latch2• 12 years ago

Ran UnixBench

c4.2xlarge https://gist.github.com/karlseguin/a659ef87b3a4a5d590e9

c4.8xlarge https://gist.github.com/karlseguin/0f38b9ad87ebd54375da

i7-4770 https://gist.github.com/karlseguin/5a6a45ace2048545b6c3

wise_young_man• 12 years ago

For those who prefer AWS blog posts over the product page:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-new-c4-instan...

AWS C4 Instances

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