72 EUR/month. At that price, why not keep them in house ? It would be cheaper.
There might be valid business uses for that, but for a company that invested a huge amount of money in a team of developers and then pays them through the nose for every hour whether they work or not and maybe have clients that count on updates, that is simply not acceptable.
Also many companies choose to have their entire infra in the cloud and then it doesn't make sense to spend effort to integrate one physical machine.
We need decentralization, smaller providers like Hetzner and also in-house IT.
I work for large corporations and the calculations are entirely different from what a small, cash strapped startup would be doing.
For example, if you work on a new product and it would take 1 day to get Mac Mini for free vs you would be paying for cloud solution 1000 dollars daily but get it one day sooner, it might still be well worthwhile to get cloud version.
Because if you think about it, it is possible that Mac Mini would be holding up your product development for one day, then you calculate how much you hope to earn from that product daily and how much you are loosing while you haven't launched and then it is no brainer.
As I said, it depends on business case. For some, the cost of this M1 VM is not going to be any factor in the decision.
Have you seen how expensive GPUs are in the cloud? Have you seen how many clients are that pay for huge farms of these?
It's still not cheap if you can ignore the hosting cost and need it for several years but it's way cheaper than using AWS for intel mac minis.
Scaleway offers neither. Their competition is Linode and Digital Ocean.
But at 72eur/month for M1, you could buy it in a year so it’s actually a reasonable price. Unlike AWS if all you need is compute.
This is vendor lockin that AWS put you in and now you mention like it's a pro.
I am old enough to have collocates at Exodus in 2000 for the exact same reason: everyone I needed to work with collocates with them. (The later went bankrupt and became Savvis, no idea what they are called today or if they still exist)
And that's the best case, where all your connections to them start and end in the same availability zone. Just inter-AZ fees cost more than you'd normally pay for transit.
It's almost entirely lock-in.
Edit: I don't think you're right. I've checked the Scaleway console and it appears the minimum unit of billing for this is one hour. I'd check, but they're out of stock.
Second edit: I missed the part where it says 24 hour minimum period on the instance setup page:
"As required by Apple License, you must keep this instance at least 24 hours. You will be able to delete it only after 24 hours."
[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSBigSur.pdf
Edit: It seems that before BigSur the legallity of subleasing macOS was a "gray area". I guess as long as it doesn't hurt Apple they didn't come after you.