Comment by easton

You can and can’t, at least in AWS. For instance, you can’t launch a EC2 to a point you can ssh in less than 8-10 seconds (and it takes a while to get EBS to sync the entire disk from s3).

Many a time I have tried to figure a self scaling EC2 based CI system but could never get everything scaled and warm in less than 45 seconds, which is sucky when you’re waiting on a job to launch. These microvm as a service thingys do solve a problem.

(You could use lambda, but that’s limited in other ways).