Amazon, which has been rolling out new features on a monthly basis—further cementing its global leadership and widening the gap between itself and all other players in the cloud computing ecosystem—has recently announced the release of a rather unusual new feature that leaves us a bit perplexed.

Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances

A service associated with the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that allows you to launch EC2 instances on dedicated hardware—meaning network and hardware isolation from all other users—much like actually having your own hardware connected to your company’s internal network (in this specific case, via the VPC’s VPN connection), but without having to pay for the energy consumption and hardware maintenance.

We believe this feature stretches the concept of virtual machine isolation, since hypervisors, by definition, isolate virtual machines from one another—in many cases even preventing performance issues or crashes in one from affecting the others. While this feature might be appealing to some large organizations that need to dispose of an obsolete fleet of machines with high maintenance and energy costs, it could also create further (this time unfounded) concerns among a less informed audience regarding the security and privacy of cloud computing.

The cost is not insignificant, which is why we consider this service to be aimed at high-end customers who need to decommission a fairly large hardware infrastructure in order to migrate to a public cloud platform. It costs $10/hour per region, which amounts to $7,200/month just to activate the dedicated hardware option, plus the standard cost of EC2 instances and the cost of the VPC.