^ What she said. There are also the annual events like Barrett-Jackson and the Open, as well. On the tech side, we have an abundance of datacenters, and there is some cutting edge engineering work being done in the Node.js and Docker ecosystems, too.
"With that said, it's nice to see cheap ARM64 development platforms becoming available, even if they aren't as open/supported as they should be."
^^This is the ultimate take-away, yes.
Over the past year, 64-bit ARM development platforms have dropped in price from the $2999 Opteron A1100 to the $79 Dragonboard, and now to the $15 PINE64.
Correct, the Opteron's are the Developer kit, and are A57's.
Storage on these nodes is handled via loading the OS on to the onboard flash, and then an add-on SD card for additional data storage if requested. The concept for miniNodes is based on development and testing of software on ARM platforms, so, the storage is minimum, sure, but we don't envision these nodes as data warehouses.
We definitely plan on moving up to 64-bit once lower cost alternatives are released in to the channel. Right now AMD Opteron A57's run $2,999, so, they are not very cost effective.
OS choices are more limited in the ARM ecosystem, so we went for the two most popular choices (available) first: Ubuntu and Fedora.
And, Bandwidth for now is unmetered, and set to 100mbit port speed. Hope that helps!