I'm not so sure about the economics of what you describe. I think it could very well be that small customers don't really consume that much "bandwidth" that the

I'm not so sure about the economics of what you describe. I think it could very well be that small customers don't really consume that much "bandwidth" that their resource requirements could be subsumed entirely by larger uses. It doesn't make much sense that both large and small customers have to pay the same cluster fee, for example - it would be much more fair to charge more the more you use, and approach "near zero" the lesser you use it. At the end of the day, all resources are run by the cloud provider on KVMs sharing the same physical machines anyways, so it's up to them how much to charge. The fact that both small and large customers get to pay for the same amount of resources allocated for them, only means these resources are not allocated in the most efficient manner. So a cloud provider could fix this. We should also not discount the net positive effect of attracting more hobbyists and startups to your platform. That's how AWS and GCP started, for example, but now they're just focusing on more enterprise business so smaller ones mean less to them (although AWS arguably less so). But we shouldn't forget that while they don't contribute as much to the revenue, they're essentially a free advertising resource that make your platform stay "relevant" (and especially more so for burgeoning startups that could grow to bring more revenue in the future!). The moment they leave, the platform just becomes another IBM that's bound to die, for better or worse. On top of that, the anti-analogy with serverless for control plane breaks down, because one could always run it on the same shared pool of resources in gVisor or Firecracker, just like with serverless.