[inkyoto]

> How much of the services of AWS (Google/azure/etc) are really needed by the majority of customers?

Very many. And none of them are EC2 (or its equivalent). Any service that comes with the consumption based charging (i.e. no 24x7 running costs whether it is used or not) and offers a clearly defined functional feature, has plenty of appeal to cloud customers. Another part of the appeal is the mix and match nature of mature cloud platforms: the customers get substantial freedom to choose from services they can instantly start using, or roll (and maintain) their own albeir at a higher cost.

I.e. if the customer wants a queue, they get a queue, and nothing else. The cloud platform abstracts away and takes care of the underlying platform that «runs» the queue and eliminates the operational overhead that comes with having to look after the message broker that provides the said queue. There are other many examples.

[mrbungie]

Never seen the "operational overhead elimination" really happen in the wild. Sure, you lose the N Sysadmins, you gain at least N+1 SREs/Cloud/DevOps Engineers.