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I have been wondering what to do about questions that are solely about Amazon EC2 or VMware's virtualization products that don't have anything to do with actually developing for them. Example - this question about EC2 virtual cores. I have flagged some of these posts to be moved to Server Fault before and they were moved. I just wanted to have a firm ruling before I go flagging more posts.

The FAQ says that "software tools commonly used by programmers" are allowed, but hardware virtualization has purposes beyond programming. I really doubt the question would be allowed if it were about a physical CPU core, so I believe a question about a virtual CPU core should be treated the same way.

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I'm not a big fan of questions like this, mostly because we are providing free support for a company that should be paying for their own support. However...

Ask yourself this: does the question pertain to programming? Would it be something I would like to know if I was developing software for it? What is the likelihood that I would be using this service in anything other than a software developer context?

Corollary: If I am dealing with concurrency issues, might better information about how to utilize the cores in my machine (from a programmer's perspective) make be a better developer? That's a different question than "What computer should I buy to write software?"

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    Couldn't you say the same thing about any commercial product with questions/a tag on SO?
    – Molomby
    Dec 1, 2012 at 14:57
  • Questions like this depend on someone from the company stumbling over the question and having the highly-specific answer the OP was looking for. One poster even stated that his answer wasn't authoritative, since he didn't work for Amazon.
    – user102937
    Dec 1, 2012 at 16:26

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