AMIs are the most profitable because they don’t need to manufacture physical hardware/ASICs and can just charge $X per hour for software that was already writte

AMIs are the most profitable because they don’t need to manufacture physical hardware/ASICs and can just charge $X per hour for software that was already written for their hardware. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to chose to do this and it’s not because network engineers are lazy. For example, if your business uses AnyConnect for corporate VPN on prem, it might make sense to have a cloud instance as well for better integration. In AWS, Transit Gateway is a pretty recent thing and prior to that you would need to use cloud routers to route between VPCs since VPC peering is not transitive.