This is a very interesting dynamic to me. Amazon seems to compete on price with EVERYONE on everything else, yet when it comes to AWS they’re so much more expensive than competition? Is this because their infrastructure is so much more expensive to run at 0 margins?
Their competition is mostly "old" guys who can easily and "cheaply" create and manage their own infrastructure.
In other words, when they "educate" young people about "The Cloud" and how is "The Best Way, the Only Way", they win because after a few years people got used to AWS as a fact of life and young professionals don't know how to administer a Linux box anymore.
Compare Amazon's (at least network) pricing to Google Cloud or Azure and its roughly competitive.
The scale of the networks these companies are building is unlike any of the novice-level stuff companies like Hetzner deploy. As one example, in one region AWS has deployed 5 Pbps of inter-AZ fiber. They build all of their own SDN switches/routers, all the way down to the chips now, for maximum performance and configuration with the AWS API. And don't forget, they maintain a GLOBAL private network; companies like Hetzner or DigitalOcean just peer to the internet to connect their "regions".
I'll keep saying this on HN until people start listening: If you buy AWS then complain about price, you might as well go buy a Porsche then complain about the price as well. They're the best. Being the best is expensive.
But do you need AWS' custom "GLOBAL" private network? I bet most would be happy to setup a cheap network tunnel between DCs if needed. There is plenty of existing tools to do all that for free (other than sysadmin work and I bet in a lot of cases even then the bill goes in favor of that).
I'm not buying a porsche and complaining about the price, I'm buying a car and complain it requires me to drive on roads made by the manufacturer and none of the parts are properly standardized and some things are expensive for no good reason.
GCP is a real contender for potentially less money. It’s better than AWS in some if not many verticals. So I wouldn’t say AWS is “the best” (definitely not in the UI and user-friendliness department)
GCP is not nearly as good from my personal experience when it comes to support and reliability of services at scale. There are certainly some instances where GCP is easier to use, or they offer certain niche services that aren't exactly the same with AWS. Additionally given how close the costs are to begin with, it would very likely depend on your workloads as to which service was cheaper.
Overall I'd say Azure is the only real competition to AWS as a product (where they are often the most willing to negotiate a big deal), but googles open source efforts potentially pose a risk.
AWS still offers a very integrated experience and lots of people will simply pick AWS because of the brand name. Most people hosting SaaS or similar on the web don't actually need that much resources so for 98% of startups, I'd bet that AWS isn't the largest entry on their monthly running costs.
