> People are happy to pay AWS Many of them are not. We have serious vendor lock-in now, where a very few companies are gatekeepers to almost any business that

> People are happy to pay AWS Many of them are not. We have serious vendor lock-in now, where a very few companies are gatekeepers to almost any business that runs on the internet. And their margins are _enormous_ on this business. It ends up costing much, much more to pay them to run our machines for us. And increasingly, the expertise to do this is being consolidated in these companies, so the talent available to pursue any other way is diminishing as new grads never learn about the magic places their code runs. The reliability outcomes are nearly the same, despite the deferral to their expertise. Labor savings b/c you don't to learn about provisioning your own machines? Not much. AWS is so sophisticated you need to develop a nearly equivalent amount of (non-portable) expertise to actually operate it well. Remember, the alternative isn't just rack your own, it's... dedicated hosting! And lots of other options with less lock-in and more standards. It's sort of frightening how complicit the broader technology industry is in this power consolidation.