4 ms·

How is this allowed by AWS? This feels very counter intuitive to Bezo's mantra, 'your margin is my opportunity.'

• StratusBen 4y ago
  Ultimately we are just leveraging the primitives provided by AWS to make this happen. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans help AWS (which is why they offer a discount for them) as they're able to more effectively forecast and negotiate bulk purchases with their upstream vendors. If anything, on-demand usage is just charging a higher premium because of the ambiguity of when you may stop using it at a moment's notice.
• atonse 4y ago
  Because for everyone that does care to fine tune these things, there are plenty of people that still oversubscribe massively and pay way more than they have to. And this is just using all the existing billing info AWS already has.
• sokoloff 4y ago
  To some extent, AWS's introduction of Savings Plan (just before 2019 re:Invent) did significantly eat into the margin available in this space. Prior to Savings Plan, Reserved Instances purchase advising was much more lucrative (IMO). Once Savings Plan was introduced, that became a pretty great low-cognitive-effort default and could be supplemented by direct RI purchases where you either needed to reserve capacity (not that common) or where you had a fairly steady workload and could buy RIs to cover that and SP to cover most of the balance. For us, that turned this process from something that was large part black magic, spreadsheets, and guesswork into something that could be done 85+% well on half a napkin.
• wmf 4y ago
  I don't think AWS has ever been low-margin and the pricing even looks deliberately complexified in some cases, like it was designed by some kind of quant.