[Nextgrid]

To be fair, you don't have to use those features. Stick to the commodities like EC2, S3, and maybe managed databases. You might however notice that you're being ripped off and a crater is forming in your bank account.

Those specialized services are often about trading-off vendor-lock-in in exchange for cost-savings. Sometimes these savings are real but more often they're just perceived due to the disparate billing models (some services bill per the hour, some per-request, some per-GB of traffic, etc) so it makes it hard to estimate or understand what exactly you're paying for and which areas can be optimized.

At the end of the day there is no such thing as a free lunch. AWS' margins must come from somewhere, and they would not be offering a product at a loss.

[ksec]

>Stick to the commodities like EC2, S3, and maybe managed databases.

The problem is they are increasingly not a commodity. Not only EC2 or S3 but also bandwidth / transfer. The price disparity between EC2 and 2nd tier Cloud Provider like DigitalOcean or Linode continues to grow every year. And the gap between DO and 3rd tier continue to grow also.

[toomuchtodo]

AWS employs ~60k people for sales and marketing and has an operating margin of ~30%. There is room for margin compression.