This is exactly the point. Billing under this some dedupe scheme would be a nightmare. The only scale that is to be had is for the provider. Either Amazon in th

This is exactly the point. Billing under this some dedupe scheme would be a nightmare. The only scale that is to be had is for the provider. Either Amazon in this example, or some other service built on top of Amazon (or self hosted) that kept the vagaries of price fluctuation away from the customer. Notice that the way Amazon does price arbitrage with their compute nodes allows then to pull the power on them at any time when the price point moves above what you had payed for it. Anybody feel good about that happening to their data?