[andrewxdiamond]

Amazon sales and business teams are constantly focused on reducing costs for customers and they celebrate this internally too.

I have seen dozens of big ticket “we saved this customer $xxxK/year” posts on slack and other internal venues, the customer obsession is real.

[immibis]

Even the reduced cost is still ten times what it costs on a traditional provider, though, right?

[sofixa]

Wildly depends. How many people would it take to set up, deploy, maintain, secure, back up something like S3, RDS, SQS similarly redundantly based on top of just raw compute?

For some organisations, it will make sense to internalise and DIY everything. For many others, AWS/equivalent enables them to break down internal silos (instead of having to file a ticket to get storage team to provision storage for your new fancy RabbitMQ cluster, multiplied by 10 for networking, security AV bullshit, etc.) and just consume everything as a service. It's much faster, and in some cases even maybe cheaper.

Cf. Dropbox that started on S3, and a decade afterwards, migrated to self-managed datacenters.

[immibis]

If we ignore data egress fees, S3 is a rare exception to the rule that all of AWS is 10 times overpriced.