One of the things I've heard (from googlers) is that by using KVM as the underlying hypervisor, they do live migration much better than Amazon. Using that, they

One of the things I've heard (from googlers) is that by using KVM as the underlying hypervisor, they do live migration much better than Amazon. Using that, they can live migrate applications to the same servers and bin-pack much better. This allows them to squeeze more jobs onto the same hardware by leveraging their already dominant lead in machine learning to predict workloads. Basically, they can do a better job than Amazon predicting current and future workloads. As a result, they can more efficiently place workloads and literally do more with equal or less hardware. That and the fact that they have been building their own hardware better means their hardware is also very likely more advanced. Those together mean they can do the same thing for cheaper and still turn a profit. Amazon optimizes for doing something first and doing the most. Google optimizes for doing things smarter and as a result often does them cheaper. However, it also means that Google provides massively fewer services than Amazon.