@aral btw as thinking about containers while watching WestWorld (as one does) for my #VR tinkerings mastodon.pirateparty.be/web/@u… it reminds me of your question last week about CloudInit and time to boot. I'm thinking one could have a pool of running yet unused instances. This is costly yet not too much but allows for nearly instantaneous availability rather than waiting for about a minute. If you have enough data to predict when you have to provision new instances it could be both fast and affordable. Of course one rarely actually needs 1s to boot rather than 1m but ... could be a solution.