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Comment by greatpatton | Hacker News Reader

The cost here is an artificial variable as it completely under the control of AWS. They can decide to sell them very cheap to lock people on AWS.

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EC2 is just virtual machines. The lock-in parts of AWS are the ones where you're not exposed to stuff like CPU architectures.

This is generally true, but in the case of ARM instances, EC2 currently has no real competitors, as far as I know.

Scaleway used to be one but they screwed it up and removed the offering (to be fair ThunderX1 is an early platform, not fully standards compliant etc. but argh it was working)

Packet whatever their name is now (equinox metal or something) is a competitor but only against the bare metal instances, no cheap tiny VM product unfortunately.

Huawei Cloud... has weird region restrictions for their arm offering but it exists??

Most software isn't cpu-architecture specific though. Switching from ARM on AWS to x86 on another providor is likely to be quite straightforward.

That's true. I'd even made the same point elsewhere :-P

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881305

Buying Annapurna Labs also means they don't have to contend with the chipmaker's margin on the Graviton chips -- Intel's margin on server chips seems to be quite high.

Nobody pays retail.

Yes but porting to other ARM nodes isn't difficult, and if you're already using AWS you're comfortable with a fair bit of lock-in already.

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