And you are here why?

I’ve written about  Data Transfer Costs  in the past , and how they’re probably the premier source of unpleasant surprises when the AWS bill shows up. There are many many sources for these, but, in my experience, the vast majority of them come down to • Traffic to public IPs, and forgetting that  any  traffic to them, even from your own instances, counts • Static assets on EC2 which you haven’t moved to Cloudflare. Especially when you’ve got videos (ouch!) • Multi-AZ deployments, and in particular, multi-AZ RDS, where every damn write involves data-transfer costs. So fine, you know the above, what’re you going to do about it? You  could  stay on top of it with  Cloudability  or  CloudCheckr  or some such, but this really requires you to  seriously  stay on top of it. And the issue with this i s that relying on always doing the right thing to keep your costs down  will  end up ‘sploding in your face , and pr...

The folks at Azure are using   FPGAs to accelerate network performance   (and decrease host-CPU utilization) in their public cloud. There’s a nifty paper about this that was presented at NSDI ’18 (•). It’s worth reading (as is   the writeup   by   Adrian Colyer ), but the following graphs, showing the network performance of Azure vs GCP vs AWS, really caught my eye. /via https://bit.ly/2HGZtBT   Ignore the Azure bars (ok, don’t ignore them, they’re pretty nifty, but they’re not the focus here). Notice how GCP’s VM-VM latencies are better than AWS’, but   the tail latencies are much worse ? Turns out there is a reason for this, and it’s embedded in the way GCP does networking, and specifically in the way their   Andromeda   network virtualization stack works. /via https://bit.ly/2HGZtBT You can ignore most of the stuff in the stack (shown above), except for the “ Hoverboard ”, which is, in effect a sidecar that is used to proce...

Hmmm. While I was away, Tilera seems to have expanded from their 64 core start to a whole plethora of CPUs.  There are 9 , 16 , and 36 CPU models - I suppose to support people who actually want fewer cores in their servers. Mind you, that could make sense from a power perspective - if you don't need the capacity, why burn up juice? Then again, if you're running things at a scale where you actually worry about power consumption, I'd probably guess that you want the cores. Anyhow, they're out there, for those who want 'em. That said, I wonder what happened to the 100 core model.  Its referenced all over the place on their product pages , but I don't see any product literature...