I'm surprised Azure still doesn't have any ARM processors to compete with AWS' Graviton instances. It's been nearly a full year since rumors of Azure working on ARM chips (https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-designing-its-own...), and going back further it's close to 5 years since they talked up Windows Server on ARM (https://www.techrepublic.com/article/2-years-later-theres-st...) on Azure. Where is any of it though? I can go to AWS right now and spin up multiple different types of ARM processor instances, most of which are cheaper and more efficient for web-like workloads. It's really surprising that Azure hasn't been able to get anything out in all these years.
It's very possible that there just isn't much demand. This is likely for a number of reasons:
- x86 just has better support for the stuff Azure's "enterprise" customers want
- ARM servers are often more expensive to spin up than an equivalently specced x86 option
- PRISM compliance is easier on x86 (half-joking, half not)
I like ARM, and I owned a Rev1 Raspberry Pi when those were cool. But even now, ARM still has yet to make a strong case for existing on the server. And that's before we even discuss architectures like RISC-V that are out on the horizon, much better suited for servers than ARM. I'm not planning on an "ARM revolution" taking place in the next decade unless x86 is critically compromised in some way.
> But even now, ARM still has yet to make a strong case for existing on the server
This is several years out of date: AWS Graviton instances are usually a fairly substantial savings over similar Intel, with AMD in between, and Cloudflare has been reporting rather good numbers as well:
The main reason I suspect Azure doesn't have it is both Windows' legacy x86 hyper-focus (the days where NT ran on half a dozen platforms never really panned out) and a smaller number of managed services. AWS has very popular services like RDS, ElastiCache, ElasticSearch/OpenSearch, etc. where you can simply check a box and wait a couple minutes to see savings, not to mention things like Lambda being only slightly more work for many users, and that's a great way to get volume usage even if the average enterprise IT department is scared to go near it for VMs.
It's not obvious whether AWS internal operation cost of Graviton instance is cheaper than Intel/AMD instance. I believe it's cheaper in AWS scale, but I also think they tactically reduce profit margin for Graviton instances, to negotiate Intel/AMD to cut down price.
Do you mean end user as someone other than the buyer of a cloud service? That’s the context I was writing in - I’ve generally found things like https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/10/achieve-u... to be accurate as long as you’re not radically switching instance types.
There have been multiple consumer ARM Windows products on the market for the last 9 years, I'd say Windows (client, at least) on ARM64 is as solid as its x64 counterpart
I’m aware, but everyone I know who had one of those ended up complaining about software compatibility issues. In the context of Azure, I’d imagine a lot of their customers would be especially risk averse in this regard.
Most of the time they're complaining about not being able to use x86 (in Windows RT's case) or x64 (until recently) pre-existing applications, and there's no native ARM/ARM64 version of said app. In the context of Azure, if someone wants to deploy on an ARM instance, I'd expect them to be able to build a native ARM64 version of whatever they're building.
> In the context of Azure, if someone wants to deploy on an ARM instance, I'd expect them to be able to build a native ARM64 version of whatever they're building.
Have you really had the experience that a large organization has the ability to recompile everything they run? Most will have a lot of code which is provided as binaries by a vendor, and their in-house code almost certainly has dependencies and optimizations which will need to be dealt with & revalidated. No, none of that is unsolvable but it means adoption is much harder than, say, changing an RDS instance type and you'd be taking on all of the support rather than the cloud provider's much larger team.
That's what I referred to in my original comment — in my experience, the average Azure user works at a Windows-heavy enterprise IT shop where those issues would be common. That doesn't mean that I don't expect ARM servers to happen there — Microsoft announced it was coming years ago, after all — but that it's going to be slow since the upfront investment will likely have slower adoption.
Microsoft themselves said the majority of VMs on Azure run Linux, not Windows.
About the ability to recompile, if you can't build ARM software what's the point of using ARM instances? You don't need cross-architecture compatibility like you need it on the desktop version, which is what consumer complain about when talking about Windows on ARM
The point is that it doesn’t matter if you could see a 20% price performance boost if your code doesn’t run on that architecture. If you’re using software which hasn’t been compiled for ARM, you’re not asking your cloud provider for that architecture and they’re not seeing the volume needed to profitably offer it.
I think AWS has successfully been pushing this because they know they’ll see that initial volume from people seeking savings on their own managed services and things like Lambda which are easy to switch, and that will fuel interest in switching other services which require more work.
Can you clarify point two? I was under the impression that the wide consensus was for Graviton instances to have significantly better price performance for most workloads. And the current state of arm support is surprisingly good for opensource or linux based server software.
