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Comment by abhashanand1501 | Hacker News Reader

One of the easiest hack to reduce your AWS bills is to migrate from x86 to arm64 CPU. Performance difference is negligible, and cost can be upto 50% lower for arm machines. This is for both RDS and general compute (EC2, ECS). Would recommend to all.

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I'd say the best price/performance hack on AWS if you don't need web scale is just put your stuff on a tiny EC2 instance, like a t3.micro - it'll be likely faster and more flexible than lambda with much more predictable performance.

You can scale up by changing out to a bigger instance - it's surprising how far you can get with this strategy.

Lambda in my eyes is super useful for isolating a security context, such that you can give elevated privileges to a less protected place via permission to execute the lambda; isolating something dangerous or secret from the less secure place

How is the performance difference negligible? In my experience, for the same generation of hardware, ARM64 performance is better than the AMD64 one.

AFAIK ARM64 is around 20% cheaper, not sure where you got the 50%.

In different regions the price difference is different. In us-east there is a 20% difference, in ap-south it is 50%. You can check for fargate ecs pricing for example.

I'm curious if you have any posted benchmarks about it. In my own experience at work, m8a demolishes m8g core-for-core. The ARM64 core is much slower. I wonder if you're comparing vCPU-for-vCPU against Intel families that use SMT: that's one ARM64 core against one Intel HyperThread. Make sure you're using AMD.

e.g. https://www.phoronix.com/review/aws-m8a-m8g-m8i-benchmarks -- m8a won virtually all of these comparisons by a wide margin. Raw performance isn't really Graviton's selling point; price-performance is.

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