I'm still curious what the real use-cases are going to be for these platforms. I think many people see "ARM in AWS" and think they're going to get an array of super-inexpensive Raspberry Pies with Amazon's network, power, storage and APIs behind them.
But Amazon doesn't appear to be aiming for those users with this product. T3s are probably a faster and cheaper option for the "RPi in the cloud" use-case.
I suspect the real users of this platform are going to be using them for development and testing for mobile platforms.
> T3s are probably a faster and cheaper option for the "RPi in the cloud" use-case.
Cheaper? Yes. Faster? Only in bursts.
The advantage of the A1 instances is you get a full CPU core that you can run at 100% usage 24/7 for ~$18/month. A t3.small is ~$15/month, but you can only use the CPU at 100% for a fraction of the time.
If you're frequently pegging the CPU and so a T3 doesn't work for you, your cheapest option is a C5 which runs ~$61/month.
We run an auto-scaled pool of C5 instances that host stateless containerized services. T* instances don’t make sense since we run them pretty warm all the time. If we need less capacity, we scale down. The appeal for this type of workload is purely compute per dollar spent. They are substantially cheaper than the x86 options.
But Amazon doesn't appear to be aiming for those users with this product. T3s are probably a faster and cheaper option for the "RPi in the cloud" use-case.
I suspect the real users of this platform are going to be using them for development and testing for mobile platforms.