AWS does a great job of promoting how lean it is and continuously drops the price of AWS. Yet, there are companies who find it is lower cost to move out of AWS and run their own cloud. How can that be?
Here is a thought experiment. There are currently over 1,000 job openings in AWS. Amazon overall has over 100,000 employees. Let’s just say that the AWS team is 5,000 employees and they are have 20% job openings. Do you need 5,000 employees to run the AWS services you are using no. Many of those people are developing new services and new customers. So part of your payments are the costs to fund the growth of AWS.
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When you are small this cost is not significant amount and the value of what you get from not having to have infrastructure people is worth it. As you grow and start paying $10k a month, $40K a month, then maybe $75K a month, what % of your payments are now going to fund AWS’s growth?
Take a look again at the 1,000 people AWS is trying to hire. Are those people and features you need? There are 622 job openings just in Seattle.
I think part of the reason why companies choose to move out is the features they need are clear and they just need a handful to run their services.