Also, the comparison used 3-year reserved instances (if I read correctly) but didn't have a pricing plan (the part of the contract with AWS that specifies your

Also, the comparison used 3-year reserved instances (if I read correctly) but didn't have a pricing plan (the part of the contract with AWS that specifies your discount). $400M->$300M if you know how to negotiate (I'm an engineer but to save $5M I learned how to negotiate. It's unpleasant but effective). What I'm struggling with is their estimate. I work for an enormous enterprise that runs tons of stuff on the cloud and our budget is less than a quarter of their AWS estimate. We avoid products like EBS unless they are necessary, and use RDS whenever possible.