Just read this old thread and thought it would be interesting to continue the conversation.
I’m working on a related idea introduced here. In summary: an orchestrator canister controlling non-replicated instances which developers can use to run the services that they currently run on AWS.
Important to underline that this is not meant to substitute the IC but to substitute what cannot currently be done on the IC and therefore is run on AWS.
As @free mentioned, I fully agree that by using these non-replicated instances you would lose “tamper- and censorship resistance” however I think we can still manage to create an infrastructure that is better suited to the needs of IC devs and their communities (payment with tokens and deployment performed automatically from a canister instead of manually by the dev team).
In particular, we could provide tamper-resistance by requiring SEV-SNP and censorship-resistance by only relying on these instances for stateless services, so that if one instance goes down the orchestrator canister can immediately deploy the service on others.
This is also in line with keeping the state (and everything else that can be hosted) on the IC while relying on these other instances mostly for “side services” which, while necessary, are not critical to the security of a dapp.