[paranoidrobot]

My previous job used Softlayer heavily.

Two of the biggest advantages were:

Price for hardware. As a base price, their bare-metal gear was significantly cheaper than equivalent-specced AWS gear (if it was even possible to get something like that). We managed to snag quite a few 'interesting' configurations of things at various times that you just couldn't get at all in AWS. Things like PCI SSDs, very large RAM configs, or High-Frequency low-core count CPUs.

Free international/regional transfer. We took significant advantage of this to move data around. We'd replicate TBs of data around.

At various times management and dev teams would complain and say that we should move everything to AWS (or whatever cloud provider they'd just met with at a conference).

We consistently showed higher performance and lower cost by significant margins. On cost alone, we were paying a small fraction of what it'd cost on AWS, even after taking into consideration ways to reduce cost on AWS such as scaling, spot instances and reserved-instances.

[jgalt212]

I really would like to see an AWS memo which maps out common use cases and expected costs (selling points) vs actual use cases and actual costs (pain points).

[paranoidrobot]

I don't think there's one good answer for everyone that's going to be right.

I think the biggest issue is that far too many people assume that the AWS Savings stories are universally applicable, and that it's safe to assume AWS is going to be the cheap option.

I'm sure there are folks for whom AWS is the cheap option, but it wasn't at my last job, and it's not for my current one (even though they are using it).

[goatherders]

Surely not from AWS themselves. They have zero reason to disclose data showing how expensive their services are relative to expectations.

[dahfizz]

> They have zero reason to disclose data showing how expensive their services are relative to expectations.

A cynic might argue that is why their pricing structure is so complicated in the first place.

[dsmcr]

More likely their service offerings are growing so fast that trying to make the pricing structure coherent is like a hyper-aggressive game of whack-a-mole.