[dsr_]

"It is valuable if we ever reach a point where say, AWS has a monopoly on all compute power, and starts making bad/unfair/predatory decisions that hurt customers."

Or... we could use intermediate libraries that translated our desires into whatever backends were currently cheap or fashionable, thus making it relatively easy to deploy across multiple infrastructure companies and just possibly preventing this monopoly from happening in the first place.

I encourage my competitors to code directly for Amazon APIs, though. I'm sure it gives them a performance advantage.