Got to agree. Bare Metal performance isn't appreciated enough. I know a few companies that run fine with a mixed Metal/AWS combo. Metal handles 80% of the workload, and if that for some reason fails, EC2 instances are fired up to take over until it is fixed. This setup doesn't work for every scenario, but it is something to take into consideration.

Indeed.. I am wondering the same.. I fear that at some point the baseline for performance will be some virtualized server and people will forget just how fast real hardware can be.. At some point people will think it's normal to host a simple blog on 5 virtual servers ;)

Also, by its nature EC2 should be terrible for serious benchmarking, since you have no control whatsoever about the infrastructure.

Because people think they can't use bare metal and thus its advantages are irrelevant.

From what I know about the Xen virtualization used by EC2 the instance variability is too high to get consistent results over time and the overhead for this type of benchmarks is so big it's not even funny.

That's why the bare metal results are the only relevant ones. The playing field is fair and stable. Let the battle begin ;-)