Yes it’s weird that you have to ask them for instances which some actual physical person looks at your request, thinks about it and says yes or no to.

Instead of providing you with a list of the resources they do have, you have to play this weird game where you ask for specific instances in specific regions and then within several hours someone emails back to say yes or no.

If it’s no, you have to guess again where you might get the instance you want and email them again and ask.

I envisage going to an old shop, and asking the shopkeep for a compute instance in a region. He hobbles out the back, and after a long delay comes back and says “nope, don’t have no more of them, anything else you might want?”.

It’s surprising this how it works. Not the auto scaling cloud computing used to bring to mind.