Cloudflare, a company that specializes in web security and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack mitigation, just reported that it managed to stop an attack of an unprecedented scale.

Cloud operators provide price incentives so that users gravitate towards newer generations (and between server architectures). Figure 1 shows lines of best fit for the average cost per virtual central processing unit (vCPU, essentially a physical processor thread as most processor cores run two threads simultaneously) of a range of AWS virtual instances over time.

Passwordless sign-ins are already a practical reality, but they're sometimes clunky — and three of the biggest tech companies believe they can reduce the friction.