Yep. The thing to remember is that even if you could do better -- and it is certainly possible -- your customers might not pay you for it. It will cost you, a

Yep. The thing to remember is that even if you could do better -- and it is certainly possible -- your customers might not pay you for it. It will cost you, a lot, to build a significantly better system than AWS. Reliability is about redundancy, and redundancy is synonymous with paying for things that sit idle for years at a time, and paying for the hardware and personnel to run disaster drills over and over, and customers hate that. Reliability is also about avoiding excessive complexity and limiting the rate at which you change things, and customers hate that too. If they wanted highly reliable, slow-changing established tech they'd be using land-line phones, not Quora or Reddit.