[saranagati]

Is that really that much different than hard drives? No hard drive manufacturer uses the same standards to determine how much space there will actually be on the disk. You can get hard drives that spin at many different RPMs. You can get hard drives with many different connector types. Drives with different numbers of platters. An 8TB, 7200 RPM, SATA, Western Digital drive is not going to have the same seek time as a 1TB, 7200 RPM, SATA, Western Digital drive.

There are so many combinations of hard drives that will result in different performance for different situations all with different costs. Then you start talking about cold storage as well and you've moved into other media formats.

Just because there is a page worth of a pricing model doesn't mean AWS or any cloud provider is doing anything incorrectly. You're paying for on demand X and engineers who are going to utilize that should understand it as well as they would understand how to build an appropriate storage solution of their own. On demand just means now they don't have to take the time to design, implement and operate it themselves.