[Jensson]

You need a lot less people per computer when you have millions of computers like big tech has than when you have 10.

The cost of these services is not because big tech has to use that much to run them, but because big tech would make less money if they lowered prices. AWS generates tons of profits, why lower that for no reason?

[zrm]

> You need a lot less people per computer when you have millions of computers like big tech has than when you have 10.

That's not the people we're talking about. Racking a server and setting it up to do virtualization takes maybe a few hours for one person, if that, over a period of years. Maintenance on the host itself is the same.

The real labor cost is in setting up and maintaining applications for your specific needs. None of that goes away by using someone else's hardware.

[Jensson]

> The real labor cost is in setting up and maintaining applications for your specific needs. None of that goes away by using someone else's hardware.

But AWS does a lot of that for you by offering cloud services and not just hardware. That is why people pay so much more for AWS than other just hosting solutions.

[zrm]

That doesn't explain why their pricing for generic VMs or bandwidth is so high, or why anybody should want to pay them for that.

It also doesn't really work. Some textile company is going to have some line of business software to run their textile mill. Amazon doesn't provide that. You still have to do labor to configure it. These are the hard things, because they're custom and don't have a huge installed base of people who already encountered and solved all the problems you're going to have. But for the same reason, they're the things AWS doesn't provide.

What they provide is common things like DNS. But DNS is easy to set up and maintain, because it's common, and so already has smooth edges. That's not where the labor was going.