Virtualization adds a constant overhead to various I/O operations, usually reckoned to be 2-5%, and nothing to CPU bound processes since the CPU just executes u

Virtualization adds a constant overhead to various I/O operations, usually reckoned to be 2-5%, and nothing to CPU bound processes since the CPU just executes userspace instructions as normal. For AWS the overhead will be less since they use a specialized partitioning hypervisor and a lot of custom hardware assistance, including paravirt I/O devices implemented directly in hardware. This small overhead is almost always a good trade-off for the convenience of virt / cloud, such as easy provisioning, live migration, hardware independence and so on. The DBOS decision to only target the cloud makes lots of sense.