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Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

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81–90 of 165 posts

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#81
post #35
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.

I've moved two clients to colo. Dramatic cost savings. So many systems only use VMs and a few basic cloud features. Everyone knows this, but just to make the point, you can still use certain cloud products (cloud storage for example) just fine while running your primary workloads on your own hardware. Sometimes it makes perfect sense, and you just need someone to nudge you and tell you it's going to be ok.

[dead]

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#82
post #18

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 wrote the article. I would NEVER tell anyone to use Oracle, as the vendor lock in and strong-arming and pricing is ridiculous. That said, I am hosting small projects on Oracle Cloud, due to the super low cost. I can just move them whenever they decide to be naughty, I am not using an oracle DB or anything proprietary, just linux VMs with my own mysql setup.

I was confused by your comment. I assume you meant to say "I would NEVER tell anyone to use Oracle DB" (as opposed to Oracle Cloud)?

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#84
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by 6 months already paid the machine. You originally said “a couple months” but now it’s 6 months and assumption of $0 collocation fees which isn’t realistic In my experience situations rarely call for precisely 32 cores for a fixed period of 3 years to support calculations like this anyway. We start with a small set of cloud servers and scale them up as traffic grows. Today’s tooling makes it easy to auto scale th…

Don't nit-pick the "couple". It was used casually - like to mean not terribly long time. So the 2-6 spread, while technically big, is still just a trifle. While I'm nit-picking; up thread is talking about a limited box for CI and you're talking about scaling up real business workloads. That's just like the difference between 2 and 6. Give it a rest. Everyone: run your scenarios and expectations in a spreadsheet and t…

> So the 2-6 spread, while technically big, is still just a trifle.

I think you’re misreading. Even the 6 month thread was based on invalid assumptions of $0 collocation fees. Add in even cheap collocation fees and it’s pushed out even further

That’s not really a nit pick when the claims were based on impossible math. It’s more of a Motte and Bailey where they come in with a “couple of months” claim that sounds awesome on the surface but then falls back to a completely different number if anyone looks at the details.

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#85
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…

Hetzner charge between €10 and €48 for an 8vcpu setup, depending on how many other users you're happy to share with. For €104/mo you can get a 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D (basically identical to your 4565p) w/ 128GB DDR5, 2x2TB PCIE Gen4 SSD. That's not to say you're wrong about dedicated being much better value than VPS on a performance per dollar basis, but the markup that the European companies charge is much, much lo…

Great points. If we’re going to talk about dedicated servers and long lock-in contracts, you have to look at the equivalent prices for hosted alternatives.

It’s fun to start thinking about building your own server and putting in a rack, but there’s always a lot of tortured math to compare it to completely different cloud hosted solutions.

One of the great things about cloud instances is that I can scale them up or down with the load without being locked into some hardware I purchased. For products I’ve worked on that have activity curves that follow day-night cycles or spike on holidays, this has been amazing. In some cases we could auto scale down at night and then auto scale back up during the day. As the user base grows we can easily switch to larger instances. We can also geographically distribute servers and provide lower latency.

There is a long list of benefits that are omitted when people make arguments based solely on monthly cost numbers. If we’re going to talk about long term dedicated server contracts we should at least price against similar options from companies like Hetzner.

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#87
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…

Yeah I expected this benchmark to include hosted "metal" hardware with the "per instruction cost" benchmark to see how provider like Hetnzer fare against classic AWS VMs. It's a bit apple to oranges I know, but I think nowadays is what most people compared pure performance cost are interested in. I'm not going to migrate from AWS VMs to GCP or Hetzner VMs, but I might be open to Hetzner hosted servers instead for a massive enough cost reduction.

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#89
post #39
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…

I used to run a site that compares prices[0]. Not only is the ecosystem pull to the cloud strong, but many developers today look at bare metal as downright daunting. Not sure where that fear comes from. Cloud challenges can be as or more complex than bare metal ones. [0]: https://baremetalsavings.com/

Partitioning a server! Omg lol

It’s funny, bc AWS did not start this tour of business. What they did do is make it possible to pay by the hour. The ephemeral spare compute is what they started.

Yet almost nobody understood the ephemeral part.

You might even be better off running a macmini at home fiber, especially for backend processing

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#90
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…

> i am trying hard to convince more people to rack themselves especially for CI actions.

What do you think the typical duty cycle is for a CI machine?

Raw performance is kind of meaningless if you aren't actually using the hardware. It's a lot of up front capex just to prove a point on a single metric.

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