[imbriaco]

It's very true in my experience, and we've looked pretty hard at all the options. Thanks for the offer of the slides, I have first hand experience with this at scale.

It certainly depends a lot on how sophisticated your autoscaling is and how closely you're able to follow demand to limit waste, how well you can manage per-host utilization, whether you are CPU or memory bound, and lots of other factors. But even at truly massive scale the cloud hosting option can be very competitive without nearly as much management overhead.

[dijit]

Interesting! I have the opposite experience and I also operated at quite a decent scale.

I wonder why our experiences are so different.

For context I was running 2,500+ instances at peak with 40vCPU and 256GiB of memory: the most expensive of those of course being in the regions with low density of players like South America and Australia.

We also had a predictive auto-scaler for our cloud components, I would estimate that our waste was 15% at any time, but if we ran bare metal only it would have been cheaper (except for the operational cost and the fact we needed lengthy commitments for hardware)

[imbriaco]

We run rather a lot more than 2500 instances at peak and a variety of instance types dependent on game mode. Our waste is on the order of 5-7% depending on the time of day -- we can run less waste on the downward slope of the demand curve for instance.

We're also seeing some pretty compelling results from ARM based instances: https://www.wired.com/sponsored/story/changing-the-game/