> Someone takes your pencil, and puts it in a really nice box with some other pencils. Not quite, because what you're paying for in AWS for instance is not jus

> Someone takes your pencil, and puts it in a really nice box with some other pencils. Not quite, because what you're paying for in AWS for instance is not just the nice box (and AWS glue like IAM), but abstracting away all the annoying hardware stuff you'd have to deal with yourself if you went box-free. Particularly, it's a lot easier to scale hard up and down (and thus better align your infrastructure spending with the actual demand) in the cloud than it is with on-prem hardware. So cloud providers are billing for that convenience and flexibility because maintaining all that hardware and providing the glue between the services becomes their problem. I'm not really AWS's biggest fan (I go full self-hosted on my personal projects and when I must use AWS for work I'm careful to avoid vendor lock-in), but neither do I think it's fair to characterize them as just putting pencils in a box.