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Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#51

Post by endorphone »

khjkhj wrote: post #50
lukevp wrote: post #6

I’m a big fan of CloudFlare. I own a little stock, and I moved our company over to it after running on a competitor for about a year. CloudFlare has been much better. Whenever I use the front end, it just feels like it’s made by people who actually need to use this stuff, and it is so straightforward. The api is great too. When we were with the competition it was ridiculous how often we had to have an engineer assist…

I need to pay my student loans, so Imma ask: How much can I get for posts like this?

Cloudflare's CTO posts on HN, so many here seem to feel like they need to defend and herald the company for absolutely banal activities, as if they're personal friends. Whatever.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#52

Post by almost_usual »

khjkhj wrote: post #50
lukevp wrote: post #6

I’m a big fan of CloudFlare. I own a little stock, and I moved our company over to it after running on a competitor for about a year. CloudFlare has been much better. Whenever I use the front end, it just feels like it’s made by people who actually need to use this stuff, and it is so straightforward. The api is great too. When we were with the competition it was ridiculous how often we had to have an engineer assist…

I need to pay my student loans, so Imma ask: How much can I get for posts like this?

you had to create a throwaway account to post this?

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#53

Post by KaiserPro »

At FAAG its well known that some AMD procs are faster, cheaper and cooler(well higher performance per watt). None of that is in doubt, what they are having trouble with is supply.

It appears that AMD are not able to provide either the support (microcode tweaks, firmware heads up, firmware testing and bug reporting) or the volume to be useful.

The conclusion was that AMD want to nail consumer first.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#54

Post by almost_usual »

endorphone wrote: post #51
khjkhj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to pay my student loans, so Imma ask: How much can I get for posts like this?

Cloudflare's CTO posts on HN, so many here seem to feel like they need to defend and herald the company for absolutely banal activities, as if they're personal friends. Whatever.

What? Cloudflare gets flamed for nearly everything on HN with bizarre conspiracy narratives. You’d think they were the NSA with the comments I’ve read.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#55

Post by Thorrez »

sudhirj wrote: post #13
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blog post is by Nitin Rao, Head of Global Infrastructure at Cloudflare. Submission and editorialized title change is by John Graham-Cumming, CTO at Cloudflare. Not sure what to make of that.

jgrahamc is more active on HN, and he seems to keep tabs on all Cloudflare discussions and answers questions when asked. Don't see what's odd about it. Haven't noticed Nitin here.

It's not odd that he submitted it. It's odd that he changed the title, given the HN guidelines against changing titles.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#56

Post by KaiserPro »

jasode wrote: post #4

Yes, there are lots of stories of individuals and companies choosing AMD over Intel. For me, what's more interesting would be any contrarian view listing the compelling reasons to pay the higher price for Intel instead of AMD. Off the top my head, some reasons would be: - Intel AVX-512 instruction set - Intel 4 and 8 sockets What realistic workloads have a better performance/cost advantage on Intel vs AMD EPYC? If yo…

I think the real reason people are sticking with intel is the support and supplychain.

Intel have a reasonable two-way communications system with big customers, they also write their own firmware still, instead of slinging it out to contractors (although AMD are apparently changing that)

crucially they are able to supply 500k procs at a fixed price in a fixed deadline.

AMD are yet to be able to do that for big non-consumer suppliers(is what my hardware contacts tell me that is. )

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#57

Post by jgrahamc »

sersi wrote: post #36
AznHisoka wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastly?

I'm also rather interested to know if it is Fastly, I am considering switching away from them. The control fastly offer through the VCL is great but cloudflare workers look really great.

Resources on how to switch from VCL to Cloudflare Workers: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/archive/recipes/vc...

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#58

Post by jgrahamc »

khjkhj wrote: post #50
lukevp wrote: post #6

I’m a big fan of CloudFlare. I own a little stock, and I moved our company over to it after running on a competitor for about a year. CloudFlare has been much better. Whenever I use the front end, it just feels like it’s made by people who actually need to use this stuff, and it is so straightforward. The api is great too. When we were with the competition it was ridiculous how often we had to have an engineer assist…

I need to pay my student loans, so Imma ask: How much can I get for posts like this?

https://blog.cloudflare.com/no-payola-here/

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#59

Post by jgrahamc »

matt2000 wrote: post #25
jgrahamc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried to switch to ARM. We maintain our ARM port of all our code for the day there are servers we can use. However, we are in production with AMD now. From one of the posts: "Readers of our blog might remember our excitement around ARM processors. We even ported the entirety of our software stack to run on ARM, just as it does with x86, and have been maintaining that ever since even though it calls for slightly mo…

Do you see any ARM chips on the horizon this year or next that might change the equation? It looks like Amazon is seeing 40% better performance per watt (I think they said the power draw is comparable somewhere) with their custom design, will a commercially available chip be able to match that soon? Side note: Thanks for making a great product and keeping it cheap/free for hobby projects! I got comfortable with the b…

We continue to look at ARM and test things. We continue to look at Intel and test things. Right now AMD makes the most sense for the servers we are deploying today. But don't be surprised if we have more Intel in our future or ARM.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#60

Post by wjnc »

aloknnikhil wrote: post #46

I really wish AMD would focus on its tooling. The Intel VTune Amplifier is a fantastic multi-platform profiler that can help understand how effectively your software is using the hardware (Pipelining, micro-ops efficiency, cache usage, etc.). If AMD could come up with something similar, it'd make their offering a no-brainer. > https://software.intel.com/en-us/vtune

I think (without too much knowledge in this field) that AMD has had to play catch-up for so long in silicon that now the catch-up is complete, it will take some time to recognise organisationally that more focus on non-silicon is overdue. Silicon lives in an ecosphere, but without competitive products there's little use in investing in that ecosphere. If you suddenly get there, you need to change your game quite drastically.
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