Good start of the year for AMD – the Intel CPU flaw…

<p><span style="color: rgb(61, 61, 61);">Houston, we have a problem.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span class="ql-cursor"></span>https://meltdownattack.com/</p><p><br></p><p>Intel screwed everyone. Microsoft Azure just lost billions and even 5% overhead blows Green/Carbon neutral Datacenter benchmarks to smitherians. Amazon AWS just lost billions, so did Google's GCP.</p><p><br></p><p>Thougths on Meltdown?</p><p><br></p><p>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/business/computer-flaws.html</p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(61, 61, 61);">Chipmakers like Intel will have to do a full recall– unclear if there's even manufacturing capacity for this– OR customers will have to wait for secure processors to reach the market, and do their own risk analysis as to whether they need to swap out all affected hardware.</span></p><p><br></p><p>Reading unprotected memory is a huge issue for cloud providers….things like SSNs in memory, Credit Cards are not required to be encrypted in memory, passwords, it's truly frightening.</p><p><br></p><p>“Whereas Meltdown is an&nbsp;<strong>urgent</strong>&nbsp;crisis, Spectre affects virtually all fast microprocessors,” Mr. Kocher said. An emphasis on speed while designing new chips has left them vulnerable to security issues, he said.</p><p><br></p><p>“<strong>We’ve really screwed up</strong>,” Mr. Kocher said. “There’s been this desire from the industry to be as fast as possible and secure at the same time. Spectre shows that you cannot have both.”</p>

<p>Oh the fun is really hitting us in both aws and azure now due to the 'patch'. </p><p><br></p><p>After the AWS and Azure forced reboot for Meltdown, Multi-MILLION CONSUMER FACING Service is seeing a pretty significant time drift on servers (~7 seconds per minute). We've hacked a scheduled job to continually sync time to avoid problems with API timestamps causing failures. We've reported an incident to both AWS and Azure and this IS a known issue. Latest response: Thanks for waiting. I advised you that there is currently a known issue where instances in M4 and R4 families show continuous time drift and a high severity investigation is being carried out. At this stage the only workaround is to change the instance type to C family such as C4.Xlarge. </p><p><br></p><p>Same thing from Azure with the recommendation being to move to <span style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">Standard_F64s_v2. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">This is gonna be pretty expensive pretty fast…</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">m4 ~ </span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">$0.062 per Hour</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">c4.XL ~ $0.126 per Hour</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-color: rgb(247, 247, 247);"> </span></p>