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

There is a new public cloud provider that exited beta this past weekend and is exclusively offering Linux instances from Arch Linux to CentOS to Debian and Fedora. In addition to the usual assortment of Intel Xeon powered clouds/VPS instances, they also offer a range of AMD EPYC powered systems too.

SkySilk has provided some credits for our testing and benchmarking of their new Linux cloud / virtual private servers. I've spent the past few days trying out some of their instances and running off a variety of benchmarks. While reviewing cloud providers isn't one of our main focuses at Phoronix, I always take the opportune to benchmark public clouds for fun. So for now are some of my initial tests for reference purposes should you be shopping around for a new cloud provider.

SkySilk aims to offer lower prices than competing providers like Amazon EC2, Digital Ocean, and Linode. Indeed, their prices are lower for similar or superior specifications -- but I haven't completed enough benchmarks yet for verifying how their (v)CPU performance correlates to the performance offered by their competitors and how it compares on a performance-per-dollar basis. Like many cloud providers these days, they are using SSDs for all of their storage.

Their basic and standard tiers are currently relying upon Sandy Bridge era servers, which may explain how they manage to deliver so well on price. Their premium plan is what's more interesting as there is the option of Intel Broadwell Xeons or AMD EPYC 7000 series processors. Their premium instances also have a faster network backbone, triple NVMe storage replication rather than dual, and offer free backups, snapshots, and unlimited bandwidth transfer. Unless you are looking for a basic VPS/cloud and just care about price, I would certainly push for the premium plan over the basic/standard plans due in large part due to the use of the dated Sandy Bridge architecture.

The standard plan with Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge CPUs can be found at a low rate of 4 vCPUs, 12GB RAM, 200GB SSD, and 100 MB/s connection for merely $20.00 USD per month or even 6 vCPUs, 24GB of RAM, 400GB SSD, and 100MB/s connection for just $37.50 USD per month.

SkySilk appears to be building out their clouds in New York and Los Angeles while it's in the LA data center where they appear to be basing their premium services.

Their EPYC packages range from 1 vCPU, 512MB RAM, and 10GB NVMe for $5 per month to 4 vCPUs / 12GB RAM / 200GB NVMe for $100 USD per month. Their "gigantic" flagship tier at the moment is 16 vCPUs, 96GB RAM, and 1.6TB NVMe storage for $750 USD per month. There are also even larger plans not currently available. The pricing between the AMD EPYC 7000 and Intel Xeon E5 Broadwell v4 CPUs appear to be the same for the given vCPU / RAM / storage plans. Billing is on an hourly basis as well.

The current operating system options include various versions of CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux, Gentoo, and openSUSE. There are also various app/tool deployment options from Wordpress to ownCloud to PostgreSQL and Jenkins for quickly and easily deploying your services in the cloud.