[bambax]

> they created a market

Yes they did, but they also reportedly have a 30%+ net margin. How is it surprising that other players who are in the position to do so, will attack them on price? While of course offering full API compatibility, which is what challengers have to do.

Do we need board game analogies to explain that some components of AWS are going to get commoditized?

The response from AWS will be innovation.

[adventured]

It has been fascinating to watch the price freeze, the collusion, between the three majors in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. They stopped hatcheting each other on price years ago. The downward price competition used to be very common in the earlier years, they'd frequently undercut one right after another. They like their profitability and oligopoly, so they stopped doing it (among the giant companies only more desperate Oracle continued to aggressively slash at things like egress fees).

Enter Cloudflare.

[peytoncasper]

Isn't this to be expected though?

Early on, optimizations are everywhere which allow you to pick the low hanging fruit. Ideally, this gets passed onto the consumer.

However, over time, the optimizations become more costly to develop and less of them exist.

Just the other day I got a notification from GCP about new Spot Instances driving prices down by 80% which exceeds their existing preemtible instances.

Similarly with AWS releasing Graviton instances offering better performance and cheaper pricing.

I think egress fees have always been the catch, and I don't think they've seen much price changes over time. So I am excited to see it, but I wonder how much of that is due to the current one directional nature of cloud migration.

Most people are moving to a single cloud. As a result, there probably hasn't been a ton of demand to negotiate the outbound movement. We can debate the merits of the lock in nature, but I don't think that technological improvements really help here. This is just a decision to charge for bandwidth or not.