I did just say that "you don't get to touch the machines physically either". What does being able to buy them have to do with.. anything? The concept of renti

I did just say that "you don't get to touch the machines physically either". What does being able to buy them have to do with.. anything? The concept of renting a VM is not new. The introduction of processors that a VM hosting company designs exclusively for use on that service is, and the comments in the thread above seem to imply a fear of this causing some kind of lock-in or whatever. What I'm saying is, this is completely unfounded fear. Graviton instances are very much standard machines and you can run the exact same OS images on there as you can on an Altra or a HoneyComb LX2K or a MACCHIATObin. (Yeah, the OS needs a driver for Amazon's network card, but mainline Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD have that.)