That's a good point. I was thinking more about from GCE/AWS side, they'll keep these old machines running because they can shuffle off low priority/power loads

That's a good point. I was thinking more about from GCE/AWS side, they'll keep these old machines running because they can shuffle off low priority/power loads to them. But it makes sense from the customer side they're just configuring by rote rather than looking for the best price-performance.