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The question is how much money Amazon spends on development of those services. What part of price is hardware expenses, what part of price is software expenses.
by vbezhenar 4y ago
The question is how much money Amazon spends on development of those services. What part of price is hardware expenses, what part of price is software expenses.
My gut feeling tells me, that it's not much.
- acdha 4y agoThere's definitely a healthy margin but don't underestimate how much time goes into making everything work smoothly. The major cloud providers do a lot of things like handling zero-downtime migration between failed physical hosts, monitoring for infrastructure issues, firmware testing/security/updates, etc. which is completely transparent to you until you realize that you haven't spent time in years on things like hardware or environmental failures (stuff like that SSD 40k hour bug which showed up here, recently, for example) or dealing with stuff like Spectre. The big confound here is scale: AWS can amortize the cost of someone really digging into firmware security over millions of customers but a smaller provider can't. You might not notice that until you either need to get your environment certified or some kind of vulnerability / supply chain attack against a hardware vendor is revealed. That can mean that AWS is both making a hefty profit reselling those engineers' work to all of their customers but also that it's still cheaper to pay them than it is for you to do that work yourself.