Nothing to add but I found this to be a well written thought exercise on a space I realize I know very little technical detail of. Thanks for writing this!
Thank you. I'm only happy to hear this was helpful. I'd also love comments from any HDL quants about how portable FPGA code would be to virtualized environments and what other languages might stand out particularly well for a VM stack.
There are cloud FPGAs, but they are offered as a compute accelerators, and have no access to the network. Trading FPGAs need network access for latency.
Im also sure that if theres enough customer demand (from people willing to spend $M), AWS will make network connected FPGA happen.
I'm sure they won't, at least without a lot of development. FPGA networking used for trading is borderline abusive of networking protocols, and I assume that Amazon doesn't want that on their production network.