Re: [9.4 CF] Free VMs for Reviewers & Testers

On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 7:25 PM, Craig Ringer <craig(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On 07/09/2013 08:35 AM, Josh Berkus wrote:
>> Since these are cloud servers, they won't work well for performance
>> testing.
>
> I did some work on that a while ago, and found that I was able to get
> _astonishingly_ stable performance results out of EC2 EBS instances
> using provisioned IOPS volumes. Running them as "EBS Optimized" didn't
> seem to be required for the workloads I was testing on.

My colleague, Greg Burek, has done similar measurements and has
assessed an overall similar conclusion: the EBS PIOPS product delivers
exactly what it says on the tin...even under random access. They can
be striped with software-RAID.

> These VMs aren't well suited to vertical scaling performance tests and
> pushing extremes, but they're really, really good for "what impact does
> this patch have on regular real-world workloads".

The really, really big ones are useful even for pushing limits, such
as cr1.8xlarge, with 32 CPUs and 244GiB memory. Current spot instance
price (the heavily discounted "can die at any time" one) is $0.343/hr.
Otherwise, it's 3.500/hr.

Another instance offering that -- unlike the former -- I have yet to
experience in any way at all is the high-storage ones, also the
hs1.8xlarge, with 16CPU, 117GB RAM, and 24 instance-local rotational
media of 2TB apiece. This is enough to deliver sequential reads
measured in a couple of GB/s. I think this is a workhorse behind the
AWS Redshift data warehousing offering. I don't think this one has
spot pricing either: my guess is availability is low.