[gaius]

Operating infrastructure costs what it costs. Amazon are paying the same per Watt of electricity as anyone else. They are paying the same per sq foot of DC. They are famous for lowballing salaries but they do need to remain in in the ballpark at least. I don't mean this as a criticism necessarily but it is what it is and folks need to understand it.

[vidarh]

Operating infrastructure costs what it costs, and it is a tiny fraction of what Amazon prices it at.

I make a lot of my income cutting peoples infrastructure costs by optimising their setups, and a lot of it involves moving people off AWS (I also move people onto AWS when they have needs that are actually best met there - there are lots of AWS services I love, but they are expensive) to save money. I can generally price my services at a few months worth of their savings.

Competing with AWS on price isn't the hard part. The challenge is the amount of people that either don't care, or think that AWS is cheap without having done realistic comparisons.

But for Oracle, those are exactly the type of customers they have built their entire business around selling to.