Costlier new cloud generations increase lock-in risk

Cloud providers tend to adopt the latest server technologies early, often many months ahead of enterprise buyers, to stay competitive. Providers regularly launch new generations of virtual machines with identical quantities of resources (such as core counts, memory capacity, network and storage bandwidths) as the previous generation but powered by the latest technology.

Usually, the newer generations of virtual machines are also cheaper, incentivizing users to move to server platforms that are more cost-efficient for the cloud provider. Amazon Web Services' (AWS’) latest Graviton-based virtual machines buck that trend by being priced higher than the previous generation. New generation seven (c7g) virtual machines, based on AWS’ own ARM-based Graviton3 chips, come at a premium of around 7% compared with the last c6g generation.