other business cases have economics where multitenancy has (almost) nothing to do with "efficient computing", and more to do with other efficiencies, like human costs, organizational costs, and (like the other post linked in the article) functional efficiencies
Otherwise, the customers are stuck with the same sizing/packing/utilisation problems. And imagine being the CI vendor in this world: you know which pipeline steps use what resources on average (and at the p99), and with that information you could over-provision customer jobs so that you sell 20 vCPUs but schedule them on 10 vCPUs. 200% utilisation baby!
But at the end of that project I realized that all this work could have been done on a CI agent if only they had more compute on them. My little cluster was still almost the size of the build agent pool tended to be. If I could convince them to double or quadruple the instance size on the CI pipeline I could turn these machines off entirely, which would be a lower total cost at 2x and only a 30% increase at 4, especially since some builds would go faster resulting in less autoscaling.
So if one other team could also eliminate a similar service, it would be a huge win. I unfortunately did not get to finish that thought due to yet another round of layoffs.
To illustrate a 128GB ram 20 core server with a 10Gbps NIC and some small SSD storage is probably going to cost you <$2000 USD for a years rental.
If that works out to same prices as keeping compute at literally your peak requirement level round the clock then something is very wrong somewhere. Maybe that issue is not in-house at blacksmith - perhaps spot pricing is a joke...but something there doesn't check out.
Loads of companies do scaling with much less predictable patterns.
>risk of slowdowns
Yeah you do probably want the scaling to be super conservative...but -80% fluctuation is a comically large gap to not actively scale
>To illustrate
Better view I'd say is: That chart looks like ~4.5 peak. So you're paying for 730 hours of peak capacity and using all of it about 90 hrs.
Given that they wrote a blog about this topic they probably have a good reason for doing it this way. Just doesn't really make sense to me based on given info
m7i.4xlarge on AWS spot price right now is $0.39/hour whereas renting the server is about half that per hour.
another thing to note is that we bootstrap the hosts, and tune them a decent amount, to support certain high-performance features which takes time and makes control + fixed-term ownership desirable
[disclaimer: i work at blacksmith]
It looks like everything old is new again.
Hyperscaler rack designs definitely blur this line further. In some ways I think Oxide is trying to reinvent the mainframe, in a world where the suppliers got too much leverage and started getting uppity.
Occasionally, the new term is warranted, of course, but that's far less common than simply trying to appear different.
shadowgovt•6h ago
(The good news is that if the spikes are regular, a sufficiently-advanced serverless can "prime the pump" and prep-and-launch instances into surplus compute before the spike since historical data suggests the spike is coming).
aayushshah15•6h ago
[cofounder of blacksmith here]
This is exactly one of the symptoms of running CI on traditional hyperscalers we're setting out to solve. The fundamental requirement for CI is that each job requires its own fresh VM (which is unlike traditional serverless workloads like lambdas). To provision an EC2 instance for a CI job:
- you're contending against general on-demand production workloads (which have a particular demand curve based on, say, the time of day). This can typically imply high variance in instance provisioning times.
- since AWS/GCP/Azure deploy capacity out as spot instances with a guaranteed pre-emption warning, you're also waiting for the pre-emption windows to expire before a VM can be handed to you!
shadowgovt•5h ago
- there are low-frequency and high frequency effects (so you can make predictions based on last week, for example, but those predictions fall flat if the company rushes launches at the EOQ or takes the last couple weeks in December off).
- you can try to capture those low-frequency effects, but in practice we consistently found that comprehension by end-users beat out a high-fidelity model, and users were just not going to learn an idea like "you can generate any wave by summing two other waves." The user feedback they got was that they consistently preferred the predictive model being a very dumb "The next four weeks look like the past four weeks" and an explicit slider to flag "Christmas is coming: we anticipate our load to be 10% of normal" (which can simultaneously tune the prediction for Christmas and drop Christmas as an outlier when making future predictions). When they set the slider wrong they'd get the wrong predictions, but they were wrong predictions that were "their fault" and they understood; they preferred wrong predictions they could understand to less-wrong predictions they had to think about Fourier analysis to understand.
LunaSea•1h ago
Is this different to lambdas or ECS services due to the need to setup a VM / container and nested virtualisation / Docker-in-Docker is not supported?