I have no inside knowledge or anything but it seems like there are a lot of scenarios with degraded performance where people could argue about whether it really constitutes an outage.
One time gcp argued that since they did return 404s on gcs for a few hours that wasn’t an uptime/latency sla violation so we were not entitled to refund (tho they refunded us anyway)
Opex > Capex. If companies thought about long term, yes they might consider it. But unless the cloud providers fuck up really badly, they're ok to take the heat occasionally and tolerate a bit of nonsense.
Yep. I was an SRE who worked at Google and also launched a product on Google Cloud. We had these arguments all the time, and the contract language often provides a way for the provider to weasel out.