I'm excited about arm in more places but my experience with arm and docker isn't as easy as i expected<p>Is it just me? When I've started using arm more, I've noticed that docker images are often incomplete or behind the x86 release cycle.<p>I love the ease of wiring docker images together for all my services (corollary: never having to understand the myriad packaging issues with whatever language the service is written in, python, nodejs, etc).<p>But when I'm using an arm image, often it is not the same version as the latest on x86, or even worse, is packaged by someone random on the internet. If I were to install the JavaScript service myself, I could audit it (not that I ever do!) by looking into the package.json file, or reviewing the source code, or whatever. There is a clear path to reviewing it. But with a docker image from the Internet, I'm not sure how I would assert it is a well behaved service. Docker itself gives me some guarantees, but it still feels less straightforward.<p>I've packaged things for an arm container myself and it isn't always exactly the same as for x86.<p>Is this just me? Am I doing it wrong on arm?
TFA describes the E3-1230 as an 8 core server when it is actually a 4 core server with 8 threads. That means the ARM vs x86 per-core performance comparisons are off by a factor of 2. I stopped reading when I noticed that. For cheap sustained compute, it's hard to beat a Hetzner auction dedi.
Great article, thanks for sharing!<p>We're using Hetzners new ARM servers ourselves, to convert images to WebP (Yes, your company name is really confusing!) and they perform almost as good as the Hetzner AMD instances.<p>But since they're so much cheaper, we can easily fire up many of them and use a load-balancer in front, saving a ton of money compared to dedicated servers.
Since moving to Apple Silicon, I've been wanting more ARM options in the cloud. Although it is possible to host x86_64 VMs, having fewer differences is obviously better.<p>I've been using Oracle's free tier for a while, and it's been OK. Performance-wise, my Objective-S and libµhttpd based web-server appears to be doing around 1800 requests per second, and held up fine to a HN hug of death.<p>Hetzner was far, far easier to set up, both from their console and via the API. Performance was comparable.
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.<p>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.
I like the article, but I wish there had been an "Abstract" or "Executive Summary" at the top so that I'd be spared having to read the entire article to find out the results. I'd like to have seen something along the lines of the following:<p>"We found Hetzner's ARM64 offering, specifically the CAX21 with 4 cores, 8GB at $8.40/month, to be a performant and cost-effective alternative to x86_64-based solutions."
According to Oracle's documentation their Arm servers are not virtualized cores but instead actual on-core tenancy, referred to as OCPU instead of conventional vCPU.<p><a href="https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/vcpu-and-ocpu-pricing-information" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/vcpu-and-...</a>
Interesting read. I'd like to know more about alpine problems (even just to confirm my bias against it, unless space savings are the most important thing).<p>For me, Hetzner is mostly baremetal provider. They have dedicated RX line, and if you have base load, a couple of those could run it all (use hetzner cloud instances for scalling and failover)
This is a great article and it’s nice to see we’ve lots of alternatives to run ARM servers.<p>I ran the now defunct Scaleway ARM server mentioned in the article for several years. For €2,99 it was a surprisingly useful machine. I ran several projects (.net core) on it and it was quite good for those simple workloads. I looked for alternatives for a while but nothing turned up until Apple restarted the ARM revolution with M1.
I've been using a cax41 (16 cores) instance for numerical computations recently. Geekbench scores are 774/10221, costs $0.04 hourly ($27 monthly). Perfectly stable. No throttling (probably not that popular yet hehe). For my specific program it's 10% slower than my laptop's 11980HK processor (8 threads, 16 hyperthreads).
> Hetzner CAX11, with a virtualized ARM64 processor, 42 cores, 4GB memory, priced at $4.91 USD per month, referred to as CAX11 for simplicity.<p>Haha I wish it was a 42 core for $4.91<p>Small typo for them to fix.
Wow, this is timely. I just bought their cheapest one last night (about $4/mo) to play with and performance test it for ASP.Net Core, vs. their x86 boxes.<p>I tried to be ultra cheap and not buy a v4 IP but it appears Microsoft doesn't have v6 IPs on all their download servers which is causing me pain.
I have been developing on ARM servers for a while. I use Raspberry Pis and Tinkerboards as dev and staging servers and push releases to an x86-64 server on digital ocean. With docker it has been pretty easy, docker-compose usually finds the right packages for the CPU and it works quite well. I am curious about maybe trying on of the ARM servers on Hertzner and see how it compares.
Great no nonsense article!<p>I'm surprised how bad xeon scales to 8 cores. But isn't the xeon instance the only one not running bare metal?? Maybe he is paying for 8 cores but gets only 2-4 physical cores?
That's interesting. I feel like I see benchmarks almost always showing ARM outperforming for all kinds of specific workloads. This is the first one I can recall showing it's not as good performance-wise, however when you add the power efficiency, cost savings, it winds up being better overall.