Premium vs Dedicated
Hello,
I have been evaluating various Linode instance types in the Chicago region and have noticed that the premium instances utilize the same CPU as both the shared and dedicated instances.
Upon executing the "cat /proc/cpuinfo" command, I observed that the shared, dedicated, and premium instances all use the "AMD EPYC 7713 64-Core" CPU.
Given this information, I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to use premium instances if they have the same CPU as dedicated and shared ones. I don't see a reason to pay extra compared to a dedicated instance, but I would appreciate your insights if I have overlooked something.
Thank you.
1 Reply
✓ Best Answer
You're not mistaken in your conclusion. The Premium plans are aimed at customers who deploy services which would be sensitive to different hardware configurations.
Generally speaking, these are customers with workloads which are time sensitive, and a guarantee of increased performance is desired for projects such as enterprise video encoding, AI, CI/CD, build servers, and data analysis. For most applications where you'd be considering a Dedicated CPU configuration then Premium CPU might enter the conversation. If you're considering a Shared CPU configuration then I would say that Premium CPU is off the table. After your testing you might wonder why though, test two Linodes and they're both the same, right?
Well that's not a guarantee, and depending upon the capacity of the data center you might find yourself deployed to a different hardware platform, or migrated at a later time to another host. Host migrations are quite common on every major cloud provider, and Live Migrations occur quietly and seamlessly when maintenance is planned or resources on one host become limited. Premium CPU plans become important in these situations to ensure a live-migration doesn't land a sensitive workload on a host with differing characteristics. I've worked with customers who have sensitive projects that immediately notice a small blip in their performance, and then ask to be migrated to a different host.
By the way, that is something you can ask our Support Team to do if you feel something has changed or you're troubleshooting a problem. If you do feel that your performance is being impacted by CPU resources then check the steps in this thread and reach out us if you're affected. We're happy to migrate someone if it might help, but we can't guarantee the next host will be a newer configuration if that's the end goal.