Interesting take. At one side, the big cloud providers have their very fair profit margins. But I've always assumed that comes mostly from that they can, and d

Interesting take. At one side, the big cloud providers have their very fair profit margins. But I've always assumed that comes mostly from that they can, and do, charge extra for the beautiful software (not seldomly through ridiculous egress bandwidth pricing). I'm skeptical of how much flexibility and optimisation the big cloud providers really get compared to a very large VPS provider? All the compute products (different form of container hosting, serverless) are essentially still priced at CPU+RAM + a premium. Some additional abstraction for nouveau databases ("capacity" or "billing" units). Many of the highly abstracted offerings also have the scale-to-zero concept, while the provider still have to have physical capacity ready (to some extent). Sure, you can probably crank out some percentage more utilisation, but that doesn't really matter for the 100+% price-add on the market bears. But I of course have no data to back up my claims, just speculation.