SkySilk Launches As Linux-Powered Cloud Provider, Offers AMD EPYC Instances

So far I have mostly been trying out SkySilk's EPYC instances. In particular have been benchmarks of their medium, power, super, and gigantic plans. With all of those instances the hardware that's been backing these virtual servers have been an HPE Proliant DL385 Gen10 server with dual AMD EPYC 7601 flagship processors. The servers are equipped with at least 8 x 32GB DDR4-2400 memory and dual Samsung MZNLF128 NVMe SSDs.

It's interesting to note they are making use of Linux Containers (LXC) rather than KVM or Xen virtualization. The instances were mitigated against the relevant Spectre vulnerabilities via the default kernel with __user pointer sanitization, AMD Retpolines with IBPB, and speculative store bypass disabled via prctl and seccomp.

For the benchmarks I ran some tests using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the EPYC SkySilk cloud. Below are some of those results for reference purposes.

The numbers basically come in line with expectations.

More data is available via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file, including some performance-per-dollar metrics based upon the hourly pricing of these EPYC cloud instances.

If you wish to compare your own cloud/VPS or system's Linux performance to the results in this article, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite. Simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1809057-RA-1809058RA29 for your own fully-automated side-by-side benchmark comparison against these SkySilk EPYC benchmark results. If you are comparing another public cloud and wish to compare the performance-per-dollar, set the COST_PERF_PER_DOLLAR= environment variable to the current hourly rate for your cloud instance if you wish to have the Phoronix Test Suite also compute that additional data.

I'll be running some more SkySilk benchmarks shortly and comparing to other public cloud/VPS providers so stay tuned for these fresh and more extensive benchmark results. To learn more about the just-launched SkySilk, visit SkySilk.com and thanks to them for providing us the credits for being able to run the benchmarks on their new service.