[spfzero]

But Amazon advertises that they DO understand the complexity of this, and that their understanding, knowledge and experience is so deep that they are a safe place to put your critical applications, and so you should pay them lots of money to do so.

Totally understand that complex systems behave in incomprehensible ways (hopefully only temporarily incomprehensible). But they're selling people on the idea of trading your complex system, for their far more complex system that they manage with such great expertise that it is more reliable.

[bradknowles]

They don’t sell “guaranteed no downtime throughout the history of the universe”.

They have SLAs. And there are clauses that cover the weird edge cases for when the SLAs are not met.