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Visualizing Meltdown on AWS

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Re: Visualizing Meltdown on AWS

#21

Post by __bjoernd »

pathseeker wrote: post #17
patrickxb wrote: post #2

It would be nice if AWS could write something official about what they are doing. I've been noticing major performance changes in our instances and have no idea if it is related to Meltdown or something else. Google released a blog post specifically on performance: https://blog.google/topics/google-cloud/protecting-our-googl... It would be nice to have similar transparency from AWS.

Google likely only wrote a blog post about it because they were able to find a way to brag that there was effectively no performance hit. They have never written any blog posts IIRC explaining bad/unpredictable performance on GCE

That's still cool and worth bragging about.

Re: Visualizing Meltdown on AWS

#22

Post by mrep »

schak wrote: post #20
mrep wrote: post #5

My team saw a 40% CPU usage increase on all of our EC2 instances and even our RDS instances. We were shocked since the media was downplaying the performance impact. I tried to start a poll but it seems as though my team was just the unlucky one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16109036

Hi, How are you trying to measure the performance impact? Are you checking the cloudwatch data or running any specific test? I am interested to assess the baseline statistics (unpatched so far) and after patching. Any suggestions?

my teams usage is pretty even so the cloudwatch graph is pretty obvious: https://m.imgur.com/a/khGxU

Re: Visualizing Meltdown on AWS

#23

Post by [deleted] »

jdangu wrote: post #3

Anyone has more info on the performance recovery today? We experienced similar performance issues over the last few days with a seemingly complete recovery today (on a cluster of ~2500 HVM T-1s).

[deleted]

Re: Visualizing Meltdown on AWS

#24

Post by gnosek »

amazingman wrote: post #19
scurvy wrote: post #16

"Why I like to run my own hardware for $100, Alex" You can patch various tiers of servers at your own leisure, depending on threat levels and exposure. Measure the impact, capacity plan, etc. Rather than it being forced on you across all tiers because cloud.

You forgot to type 5 or 6 zeros there.

https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/

Granted, that's the bottom of the barrel (single disk, no IPKVM etc.), but $100 keeps you running for over a year. Better servers are easily available as well, usually a couple of times cheaper than AWS.

Is this a US thing? Based on HN only, I'd never know there's anything between the public cloud and racks of own hardware that you have to wire up and maintain.

I have a bunch of quad core 32 GB machines with dual 480GB SSDs for less than $100/month each (and that's a rather expensive provider with great support, you'll cut the price almost in half with e.g. SoYouStart).

Yes, AWS is convenient, but it's far from the only thing in the world.

Re: Visualizing Meltdown on AWS

#26

Post by javitury »

mrep wrote: post #5

My team saw a 40% CPU usage increase on all of our EC2 instances and even our RDS instances. We were shocked since the media was downplaying the performance impact. I tried to start a poll but it seems as though my team was just the unlucky one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16109036

> 40% CPU usage increase

When I read this I thought how weird. It is usually claimed that max performance drop is around 30%. Then I remembered that we are talking in ratios, so a 30% drop in performance(0.7) means a 42% increase in CPU usage(1/0.7=1.42).

Re: Visualizing Meltdown on AWS

#27

Post by nolok »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #25

Is there an option of AWS dedicated instances without these patches? I thought all these new vulnerabilities are only really dangerous in shared environments.

> I thought all these new vulnerabilities are only really dangerous in shared environments.

You're not the first I see saying that, here and on other sites, and this is absolutely wrong.

Shared environments like clouds were singled out because not only were they impacted the worst security wise, they were also going to suffer the most from the fixes.

But even if you only have a regular normal happy server or computer for you alone, remote code execution vulnerabilities aren't unheard of; one your application (be it your own, or a specific one you use, or one of the bazillion stuff running on your system as part of the OS) gets broken and you're a free target. Or anything with a proper scripting surface.

If you're system isn't protected, and any of the application you run has a major security hole, everything will be at risk.

Re: Visualizing Meltdown on AWS

#28

Post by k__ »

This is especially interesting for workloads that already ran on >70%

Some stuff won't run in the free tiers anymore and people will have to switch to bigger machines :/

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