AWS rolled out security patches to the Meltdown vulnerability to the underlying hypervisor. All clouds are likely affected though I hear some much less than others - @rguo know more detail on other clouds?
High(er) CPU is merely a symptom of current patches. That by itself is not a major issue. It will impact capacity sizing, but does not impact current operations unless you’re already CPU starved.
What is a major issue is that IO latencies were also impacted. It is up to you to determine if the increased latency presents an actual problem for your architecture. We are seeing a latency increase across the board in AWS.
Preliminary numbers shows that GCP post-patch latencies are comparable to AWS’s pre-patch numbers. However, GCP already had a large lead in IO latencies even before. A before/after analysis of GCP is still in progress.
We will have an official statement about the impact of Spectre/Meltdown patches soon.
FYI, Amazon has made additional updates to their backend. I have seen CPU usage recover to their pre-meltdown levels. Latencies are now better, but still a marginal increase (5-10%) as compared to before Jan 4th.