Benchmarking CI across cloud providers. Got some counterintuitive result on runcloud
1 × 16 vCPU box → 60s, $0.00227
20 × 1 vCPU sandboxes → 44s, $0.00209
25% more vCPU. 26% faster. 8% cheaper. Why?
My theory: at 1:06 of the 1:20 run, 477 of 478 test modules were done and load average was 3.93 on 16 cores, meaning you're paying for 12 idle cores to wait on one straggler, while sharding lets each core stop billing the moment it finishes.
Does that hold up, or am I missing something? Curious whether the other providers show this same patter and what other quirks are hiding in there.
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“Competing on price is the dumbest strategy” is one of those guru lines that sounds smart until you look at reality.
China built the world’s manufacturing powerhouse by competing hard on price. Same playbook created massive winners across industries.
In cloud infrastructure, prices for agent sandboxes and microVMs can be marked up by as much as 13x. His company and Modal are clear examples of providers charging far more than the costs of the service.
Price competition is how real scale is built. Dismissing it just hands the market to someone hungrier.
Ignore the “never compete on price” gurus, thats how you lose the long game.
Competing on price is the dumbest strategy.
You're not buying a Porsche by dollar-per-horsepower.
Three Volkswagen Beetles might have more aggregate horsepower than a Porsche for the same money. But nobody wants three Beetles.
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This is fluid dynamics, the same math used to design wings and predict weather
267 billion calculations
16 minutes on one machine
$0.0729
this used to need a supercomputer and a waiting list
now it's seven cents in the cloud run.cloud
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naif hagatulah retweeted
run.cloud beating Vercel, E2B, and Namespace at 4x-10x cheaper price 👀
Less than $0.0000001 per second per vCPU
Thanks for the PR! New high-perf sandbox benchmark run is up including Run Cloud.
github.com/starslingdev/sand…
