A lot of AWS is built on open-source. This is obviously ignoring hardware costs. I don’t know if it is all that ridiculous anymore. These models are very good at wiring together open-source systems. The world is crazy right now…
AWS has over 200 services, so that's a little over $2 per service. Yeah, a lot of it is built on OSS, but there is a ton of it, and there is also a lot of work involved in building the APIs and web UI, and making it scalable , secure, and resilient.
Now, you might be able to make a version of some small subset of aws services that runs works ok for a small scale for with relatively simple needs, for that many tokens, but I don't think that's what they were going for.
I’m on your side in that I would never take a contract to actually do this, but…
If we swapped out the IAM backend for something extremely simple like just private keys (one per allowed service or JWT-style list all services in the key), then we could have something that looks/feels pretty similar. With a 2$ token spend.
Not at all the same but it would look/feel pretty close.
> est. total target $516.00
Lol