At some point it does come down to "we have to trust the provider isn't outright lying to us about what they're doing."

That was a hard bridge for me to cross for a long time; I got there via sustained in-depth conversations with folks there who simply wouldn't stand for something that breathtakingly opposed to everything AWS has strived to achieve from a trust perspective, that they'd sooner tear it all down than implement such a thing.

Some folks can't get there, and that's okay; if you don't have that level of trust, perhaps the cloud is not a fit for all of your workloads.

The point I am concerned about is that I am forced to trust a single party. AWS is not ever explicit in admitting this, at which point does it matter that your workload is on Nitro-this or attested-that? No university researcher, afaik, has physical access to audit these systems. I think the other major player(s) have a better story for this by harnessing features of certain cpu vendors.

To every cloud/server vendor: This is a big deal. I need a system I can audit, from silicon and firmware up, but I don’t want to water it, give it sunlight, or whisper sweet nothings to it, just to rent it out as needed.