Cloudspecs: Cloud Hardware Evolution Through the Looking Glass
Abstract
Public cloud hardware has evolved rapidly, with vendors offering hundreds of instance types differing in CPU, memory, storage, and networking capabilities. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of cloud hardware trends from 2015 to 2025, focusing on AWS and comparing with other clouds and on-premise hardware. While network bandwidth improved per dollar by one order of magnitude, CPU and DRAM gains are much smaller and NVMe storage performance has stagnated since 2016. A cross-cloud price comparison shows that smaller providers undercut the “big three” hyperscalers by up to 5× for commodity VMs. Our findings reveal shifting bottlenecks and highlight new challenges in designing cost-efficient cloud-native data-intensive systems. An interactive tool supports further exploration of the evolving instance landscape.
Application
The application is available live at cloudspecs.fyi.
