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> The marginal cost of VPC is basically 0. Otherwise they couldn't sell tiny ec2 instances. That's not strictly true. They could recoup costs on the more expen
by panopticon 6y ago
> The marginal cost of VPC is basically 0. Otherwise they couldn't sell tiny ec2 instances.
That's not strictly true. They could recoup costs on the more expensive EC2 instances.
I have not idea what the actual split is, but the existence of cheap instances doesn't mean much when Amazon has shown itself willing to be a loss-leader.
- mrkurt 6y agoSo what you're saying is kind of the opposite of a marginal cost. If they are recouping their costs, it's a capital expense, and works differently than a marginal cost. AWS's networking was extremely expensive to _build_ but it's not marginally more expensive to _operate_ for each new customer. Servers are relatively cheap to purchase, but as you add customers the cost increases with them. If they're selling cheap instances are a marginal loss, that would be very surprising and go against everything I know about the costs of building out datacenters and networks.