[snug]

AWS and GCP are giving companies like Apple huge discounts so someone could say something like, "Even Apple iCloud is in AWS and GCP because of how economical it is"

There is too much nuance to say one is better than the other. In some cases using a IaaS is more economical, in other cases it's not.

For Apple, the same is also true[0] to say "Even Apple is running their own datacenters because of how economical it is"

0 - https://dgtlinfra.com/apple-data-center-locations/#:~:text=a....

[overstay8930]

You know everyone gets those discounts right? Like that's why the cloud is so much more economical than a datacenter, once you are at scale AWS will give you MASSIVE (I'm talking 30-60% discounts) on compute and other compute-adjacent resources, and I've seen 99% discounts on bandwidth with multi year agreements too.

I think that's where the disconnect is, a lot of people don't actually realize how cheap cloud compute is because they're only seeing the price for like... 20-30 servers and some basic S3 or load balancer usage. There are entire departments at Amazon that run those numbers on a daily basis to make sure AWS is always competitive with building your own datacenter.