[outworlder]

> however there are a lot of use-cases for data for which processing is highly advantageous.

Most use-cases require 'processing', otherwise there would be no point of most cloud services and we would only ever use, say, S3.

The moment you spin up even a virtual machine, it will need to be able to decrypt the EBS volumes you have attached to it. Even if you encrypt the filesystem with your own mechanism and feed it the key by hand every time, it is still available in the instance. Instance memory is not easily available to AWS employees, but neither are the physical media that backs EBS volumes(whatever it is, details are scarce and all pieces may not even be physically in the same building). If we are concerned to that extent, then we can't use any other service. Which is ok, there are plenty of business that have requirements that disallow the use of any cloud providers.