I'd seen a more useful paper on this subject, on how to organize your game servers for a big MMO. The most economical strategy was to own your servers for the base load, and go out for AWS for peaks. Running 24/7 compute bound work on AWS is at least 2x as expensive as owning your own co-located servers.
The author sounds a bit scared. Maybe the recent wave of "we can save $$$ by leaving AWS" articles have them rattled?<p>Yes, multi-tenancy and improved hw utilization can save money ... <i>for Amazon</i>. That's of no use if they lack sufficient competition and just capture the savings as profits. Then you're just wasting time on debugging weird contention issues and cloud cost optimization consultants so Bezos can get richer.<p>The profit margins on AWS are so huge that even though you they can binpack better it often doesn't matter, you're going to still save money by going to either a cheaper cloud or using your own HW (or renting your own dedicated HW). The savings from multi-tenancy are drowned by the added costs.<p>One intriguing model that might be worth exploring is micro-clouds. In that model there's a kind of clearing market, and users with strong diurnal cycles and not many batch jobs can re-sell their CPU capacity at night to other users. They just implement some Lambda-ish API and configure the kernels/hypervisors to always prioritize their own jobs over guests. The guests don't care because they're getting the resources cheap, for the company the additional income offsets the cost of their own machines and the market takes a cut. The difference vs today's cloud models is it's more decentralized and the "cloud provider" is really just a match maker, so it's easy to set up competitors and margins would be low.
It’s ironic that AWS touts the benefit Lambda gets from overcommit, but if you build a lambda that simply turns around and makes an api call, you are paying full price for the cpu usage, even though it’s idle.
Who is this surprising to? Timesharing, timeslicing, multiprocess, multitenancy,-- whatever you call the same underlying concept -- was one of the pivotal advances in computer systems. Surely no serious person is surprised it is effective.
One thing this scalability bets on is that side channel attacks won’t get better.<p>Spectre and related attacks already reduced CPU performance.<p>Shared hardware opens up the door for side channel attacks and hardening against those attacks is going to decrease performance.