New Free offering from Oracle Cloud: ARM Cloud VMs!
Recently Oracle started to offer Ampere A1 ARM-based VMs. For Always Free tier account holders, you get up to 4vCPUs and 24GB of RAM to play with, so you can put that all into one VM, or spread it across multiple VMs. They also upped the IPv4 limits as well to 6 IPs maximum (to be spread between your 4 ARM VMs and 2 x86 VMs, or assign one to a load balancer, etc. You also get 1Gbps port speed increases per virtual core! So, my system has 4Gbps port speed since I opted to give all the juice to one VM (this is great for their offloaded database products or cross communication with other VMs). 
You also get a quota of 200GB of block storage to play with, and the performance scales upwards with image size there as well. I've done a 100GB image here as I split the other 100GB between my two x86 VMs with the traditional free resources. Oracle says the performance scales linearly for the most part as the size increases, so if you gave your VM more storage than me, you may get better disk I/O.
Oracle claims the CPU frequency of their host machines is 2.8Ghz.
Since I saw YABS now supports ARM... figured I'd throw a bench at y'all. This is in their Phoenix, AZ region. Provisioned with Ubuntu 20.04 aarch64.
https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
Note that you will need a valid credit card to sign up - They may charge you $1 just to verify it's real and make sure you are who you say you are, but I got my $1 refunded and posted back to my credit card a few days later. Some people have reported less success if you use a debit card rather than a credit card and you may need to provide different info if you're outside of the US.
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
# Yet-Another-Bench-Script #
# v2021-06-05 #
# https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script #
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
Wed Aug 25 06:02:15 UTC 2021
ARM-compatibility is considered *experimental*
Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Processor : Neoverse-N1
CPU cores : 4 @ ??? MHz
AES-NI : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ❌ Disabled
RAM : 23.3 GiB
Swap : 0.0 KiB
Disk : 96.8 GiB
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 12.62 MB/s (3.1k) | 27.27 MB/s (426)
Write | 12.63 MB/s (3.1k) | 28.08 MB/s (438)
Total | 25.25 MB/s (6.3k) | 55.35 MB/s (864)
| |
Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 24.59 MB/s (48) | 24.26 MB/s (23)
Write | 26.69 MB/s (52) | 27.07 MB/s (26)
Total | 51.28 MB/s (100) | 51.33 MB/s (49)
iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
---------------------------------
Provider | Location (Link) | Send Speed | Recv Speed
| | |
Clouvider | London, UK (10G) | 540 Mbits/sec | 398 Mbits/sec
Online.net | Paris, FR (10G) | 324 Mbits/sec | 508 Mbits/sec
WorldStream | The Netherlands (10G) | 506 Mbits/sec | 304 Mbits/sec
Biznet | Jakarta, Indonesia (1G) | 128 Mbits/sec | 36.4 Mbits/sec
Clouvider | NYC, NY, US (10G) | 939 Mbits/sec | 706 Mbits/sec
Velocity Online | Tallahassee, FL, US (10G) | 965 Mbits/sec | 775 Mbits/sec
Clouvider | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 1.01 Gbits/sec | 1.01 Gbits/sec
Iveloz Telecom | Sao Paulo, BR (2G) | 304 Mbits/sec | 242 Mbits/sec
Geekbench 5 Benchmark Test:
---------------------------------
Test | Value
|
Single Core | 822
Multi Core | 3154
Full Test | https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/9490018
If you have Oracle Cloud Free Tier, please fire one of these up and let me know your experiences! If you want another benchmark please let me know too; I'd be happy to run something else just to try it out. I find this pretty exciting especially for a free offering!
Cheap dedis are my drug, and I'm too far gone to turn back.
Comments
being a newbie its hard to run much on oracle cloud free tier arm instance. i do recall better I/O on larger storage , they limit I/O based on block size that can be calculated per GB increment or something.
they killed my free instances once the trial account expires, leaving the always free tier account only. this means what ever is running (iirc up until 90 days) will be killed for sure.
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
To some extent, yeah. I find it's best to be used for applications that run on architecture-agnostic languages such as Java, Javascript, Python, etc., which is my planned use case.
Yup, that's correct. I think they even updated the UI to tell you what to expect in terms of I/O when you select the "shape" (the amount of resources to give to your VM). To be fully honest I don't feel the I/O deficit compared to other YABS runs I've seen on better hardware in day to day uses in things like package updates or other disk-intense workloads, so I don't think the numbers do it justice. It definitely feels snappier than it looks compared to the numbers, on par with some mid-tier datacenter SSDs I've used in the past.
Cheap dedis are my drug, and I'm too far gone to turn back.
Could you provide some confirmation of this change on Oracle website?
https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm
Cheap dedis are my drug, and I'm too far gone to turn back.
maybe that's why my location is out of capacity now.
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
It reads like the 2nd sentence wasn't updated. Shouldn't it say "more than six instances" now? And yes it was 2 IPs before.
Yeah, I agree. I think they failed to update that part of the documentation. Nonetheless, I currently have 4 public IPs deployed, myself. 1 for each x86 VM, 1 on my ARM VM, and 1 on a load balancer I set up... I've been able to reserve 1 static IP and assign 1 more IP to a Bastion (basically a temporary jumpbox) as well, so it's definitely possible to get the magic number of 6.
Cheap dedis are my drug, and I'm too far gone to turn back.