At the end of the day, all of AWS is simply "I wish to mutate the state in your cloud such that your cloud will subsequently respond to request X with response

At the end of the day, all of AWS is simply "I wish to mutate the state in your cloud such that your cloud will subsequently respond to request X with response f(X)." At the end of the day, that's an API. It's just that you're also warming a "cache" that happens to be Turing-complete :)