Looks like NetBSD is already working on the EC2 AArch64 instances! My attempt at running FreeBSD there failed: for mysterious reasons, the system reboots just after the last loader.efi message..

Trying to do anything system-level on EC2 is incredibly frustrating. There is STILL no read-write access to the serial console, because Bezos doesn’t believe in debugging or something >_<

Also, about the ARM instances themselves. I am happy to see a big player enter the ARM space. And with custom (Annapurna) chips, even. (Though they’d have much better performance if they just bought some Ampere eMAGs or Cavium ThunderX2s.)

But what’s up with that price? Did anyone at AWS ever look at Scaleway’s pricing page?! On-demand pricing for a single core EC2 ARM instance is almost 20 bucks per month! While Scaleway offers four ThunderX cores for three euros per month!! Sure sure Scaleway is not a big player and doesn’t have a huge ecosystem and is getting close to being out of stock on these ARM instances.. but still, 1/4 the cores for 5x the price.

(Spot pricing is better of course.)