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Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

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21–30 of 165 posts

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#21

Anyone have experience with Oracle Cloud and ease of moving away? This benchmark seems to recommend Oracle Cloud, but I’ve heard that Oracle has historically used aggressive licenses and legal terms to keep customers locked-in.

They'll find one way or another to laugh all the way to the bank, that is for sure.

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#22
post #4

Still having your own hardware seems so much cheaper. Maybe even just for dev/uat environments? Every big corporate I have worked at has lower cost of capital than Amazon, and yet they want to move to AWS. I just dont understand it.

Going to the cloud can't possibly be as cheap as owning your own hardware for obvious reasons - they have to make money somehow. Well, unless you use spot instances, which uses spare nodes. In any case, you move to the cloud despite the cost if you need the multi-region redundancy, the management/features etc. More commonly it's because the higher ups heard everybody's doing it, but oh well :D

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#23
post #20

I just ran some massive tests on our own CI. I use AMD Turin for this on gcp, which was noted as one of the fastest ones in the article. The most insane part here is that the AMD EPYC 4565p can beat the turin's used on the cloud providers, by as much as 2x in the single core. Our tests took 2 minutes on GCP, 1 minute flat on the 4565p with its boost to 5.1ghz holding steady vs only 4.1ghz on the gcp ones. GCP charges…

> My 4565p is a $500 cpu... 32 vcpus... racked in a datacenter. The machine cost under 2k.

> The cloud provider charging $140 / mo for 3x less vcpus you break even in a couple months, it doesn't matter if it dies a few months later

How do you calculate break even in a couple months if the machine costs $2,000 and you still have to pay colo fees?

If your colo fees were $100 month you wouldn’t break even for over 4 years. You could try to find cheaper colocation but even with free colocation your example doesn’t break even for over a year.

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#25
post #4

Still having your own hardware seems so much cheaper. Maybe even just for dev/uat environments? Every big corporate I have worked at has lower cost of capital than Amazon, and yet they want to move to AWS. I just dont understand it.

The main thrust of the economic argument has been on the cost of system adminstrators that maintain the hardware. Electricity and cooling being big ongoing costs, but also when AWS released it wasn't uncommon to order a server and have it take 3 months to arrive.

I think in practice the system administrators are still in the company now as AWS engineers, they still keep all that platform stuff running and your paying AWS for their engineers too as well as electricity. It has the advantage of being very quick to spin up another box, but also machines these days can come with 288 cores, its not a big stretch to maintain sufficient surplass and the tools to allow teams to self service.

Things are in a different place to when AWS first released, AWS ought to be charging a lot less for the compute, memory and storage, their business is wildly profitable at current rates because per core machines got cheaper.

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#26
post #20

I just ran some massive tests on our own CI. I use AMD Turin for this on gcp, which was noted as one of the fastest ones in the article. The most insane part here is that the AMD EPYC 4565p can beat the turin's used on the cloud providers, by as much as 2x in the single core. Our tests took 2 minutes on GCP, 1 minute flat on the 4565p with its boost to 5.1ghz holding steady vs only 4.1ghz on the gcp ones. GCP charges…

> My 4565p is a $500 cpu... 32 vcpus... racked in a datacenter. The machine cost under 2k. > The cloud provider charging $140 / mo for 3x less vcpus you break even in a couple months, it doesn't matter if it dies a few months later How do you calculate break even in a couple months if the machine costs $2,000 and you still have to pay colo fees? If your colo fees were $100 month you wouldn’t break even for over 4 yea…

the 140/mo is for 3x less vcpu, so $420/mo savings if you use all those same cores. sorry for the poor comparison wording there. in a few months already up to $1300+ by 6 months already paid the machine.

colo fees are cheap if you need more than just 1u. even with a 50-100 fee you easily get way more performance and come ahead within a year

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#27

Anyone have experience with Oracle Cloud and ease of moving away? This benchmark seems to recommend Oracle Cloud, but I’ve heard that Oracle has historically used aggressive licenses and legal terms to keep customers locked-in.

I used their free tier.

The account creation process was really confusing, and they kept turning off my instance because usage was not high enough.

It seemed quited oudated/confusing to use last time I tried it a few years ago.

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#30
post #20

I just ran some massive tests on our own CI. I use AMD Turin for this on gcp, which was noted as one of the fastest ones in the article. The most insane part here is that the AMD EPYC 4565p can beat the turin's used on the cloud providers, by as much as 2x in the single core. Our tests took 2 minutes on GCP, 1 minute flat on the 4565p with its boost to 5.1ghz holding steady vs only 4.1ghz on the gcp ones. GCP charges…

A 16-core 4565p is of course faster in max single thread speed than a 96-core that GCP is running at an economically optimal base clock.

A year ago I gave a talk about optimizing Cloud cost efficiency and I did a comparison of colocation vs cloud over time. You might find it interesting here, linking to the relative part: https://youtu.be/UEjMr5aUbbM?si=4QFSXKTBFJa2WrRm&t=1236

TLDR, colocation broke even in 6 to 18 months for on-demand and 3y reserve cloud respectively. But spot instances can actually be quite cheaper than colocation.

You generally don't go to the cloud for the price (except if we are talking hetzner etc).

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