alt Hacker NewsFrankly, this is strictly a positive signal to me.
Fargate and lambda are fundamentally very different from EC2/nitro under the hood, with a very different risk profile in terms of security. The reason you can't run GPU workloads on top of fargate and lambda is because exposing physical 3rd-party hardware to untrusted customer code dramatically increases the startup and shutdown costs (ie: validating that the hardware is still functional, healthy, and hasn't been tampered with in any way). That means scrubbing takes a long time and you can't handle capacity surges as easily as you can with paravirtualized traditional compute workloads.
There are a lot of business-minded non-technical people running AWS, some of which are sure to be loudly complaining about this horrible loss of revenue... which simply lets you know that when push comes to shove, the right voices are still winning inside AWS (eg: the voices that put security above everything else, where it belongs).
> Frankly, this is strictly a positive signal to me.
How?
> The reason you can't run GPU workloads on top of fargate and lambda is because exposing physical 3rd-party hardware to untrusted customer code dramatically increases the startup and shutdown costs
This is BS. Both NVidia and AMD offer virtualization extensions. And even without that, they can simply power-cycle the GPUs after switching tenants.
Moreover, Fargate is used for long-running tasks, and it definitely can run on a regular Nitro stack. They absolutely can provide GPUs for them, but it likely requires a lot of internal work across teams to make it happen. So it doesn't happen.
I worked at AWS, in a team responsible for EC2 instance launching. So I know how it all works internally :)