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HOME/Articles/Switching Amazon EC2 to Arm has been nothing but happiness

Switching Amazon EC2 to Arm has been nothing but happiness

Mr. Hasegawa of the Service Reliability Group (SRG) of the Technology Headquarters@rarirureluis is
SRG(Service Reliability Group) mainly provides cross-sectional support for the infrastructure of our media services, improving existing services, launching new ones, contributing to OSS, etc.
 

Introduction

Many people have heard the word Arm a lot about the Apple M1 and have been surprised by its performance. The benchmark for the Mac equipped with the Apple M1 isHere
Amazon EC2 (hereinafter referred to as EC2) also has instances equipped with Arm.https://aws.amazon.com/jp/ec2/graviton/
This time, I was very happy after migrating all the EC2 instances for the development environment of a certain service from m5.large to t4g.medium, so I hope that reading this article will help you understand at least a little of the benefits of Arm instances.

What's great about AWS Graviton?

Arm-equipped EC2 instances are cheaper and more powerful than traditional Intel/AMD-equipped instances, making them very cost-effective.
Currently (as of November 19, 2020), in addition to EC2, it is also deployed on Amazon RDS and Amazon ElastiCache.https://aws.amazon.com/jp/about-aws/whats-new/2020/10/achieve-up-to-52-percent-better-price-performance-with-amazon-rds-using-new-graviton2-instances/https://aws.amazon.com/jp/about-aws/whats-new/2020/10/amazon-elasticache-now-supports-m6g-and-r6g-graviton2-based-instances/
We also published an article six months ago comparing the Arm-equipped m6g.large with the conventional m5.large.https://blog.luispc.com/entry/2020/05/18/190613

First step towards Arm compatibility

The Arm-compatible services this time are managed by Ansible and Terraform, so we will start by making them Arm-compatible with Ansible.

From x86_64 to AArch64 Ansible

First of all, it is important to check whether your middleware supports AArch64. Please note that some middleware has different versions for x86_64 and AArch64.
The middleware that needed to be changed in this case was the following:
  • Nginx
  • td-agent
The service we made Arm compatible this time had Ansible well-maintained, so we were able to make it Arm compatible with Ansible in less than one business day. I am incredibly grateful to the previous person in charge.

Nginx

The official Nginx repository has packages for AArch64 from CentOS 8, but since we are using CentOS 7 this time, we did not use them and instead used epel's.

td-agent

The official td-agent repository provides packages for AArch64 for CentOS 7 (starting from v4.x).
We were able to make the middleware compatible with AArch64 without any configuration changes.

About Entropy

On EC2 Arm, the entropy for random devices is very low, which can lead to errors or significant performance degradation.
This time, the performance of the random number generation part using Apache Tomcat (java) dropped significantly. This is because /dev/random is used for random number generation, and there are few resources for this.
Checking the entropy of t4g.medium
There were only eleven.

haveged

The solution to this is haveged.https://wiki.archlinux.jp/index.php/Haveged
Installation is easy with yum, and after installation it starts with systemd.
After activation, the entropy number was 1401.
Once Ansible is ready, create an Arm EC2, run Ansible to check that it works, and add it to the target group. If there are no problems, you can pull out the x86_64 EC2 and switch without maintenance.

result

Although the production environment has yet to be implemented, I have switched all of my development environments to Arm. This time, I switched from m5.large to t4g.medium.
In terms of price per hour
  • m5.large: $0.124/h
  • t4g.medium: $0.0432/h
Note that the price difference is about three times.

performance

The red vertical line is after the switch.

ALB Response Time

The grey line is m5.large

Load Average

Blue: 1 minute / Purple: 5 minutes / Yellow: 15 minutes
Although the price difference between m5.large and t4g.medium is three times that of m5.large, it is safe to say that there is no difference in performance. The development environment has 26 EC2 servers, so if we do a simple calculation of the switch to Arm,
0.124 * 720 * 26 = $2321.28/month0.0432 * 720 * 26 = $808.704/month
It will be.
Switch only your development environment without any performance degradationOver 1.8 million yen per yearIn a production environment, we will switch from m5.(x)large to m6g.(x)large, so the price difference will be smaller, but as this article explains, the performance difference is even greater, so it is well worth it.https://blog.luispc.com/entry/2020/05/18/190613
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