Not everybody is on Amazon and some of us touch our gear. You should be excited because it gives you a rapidly-improving path off of Amazon if you've gone all in on their vendor stuff. Kubernetes helps build that stuff for any vendor. Multiple startups are working on AWS in a box. That was the promise of OpenStack but now you don't need virtualization so it's automatically an order of magnitude better. Maybe two.

People don't realize how deep Amazon's hooks are at scale. We were dropping half a million USD a month at that successful startup I mentioned and could do the same work with four or five racks of hardware, storage included. I bet you could cut your opex in half on something else, and it's a safe bet because (a) I've seen it be resoundingly true even coming from three year reservations and (b) half is actually a conservative estimate. I am floored by how much money the industry throws at the fundamental inefficiency of multitenant virtualization atop AWS.

What a strange argument, considering Amazon a primitive. That's flirting with vendor koolaid. Physical and DigitalOcean/cheapo deployments are an immediate counterexample, too. Hell, if network latency is low enough, you can straddle both and schedule Kubernetes pods on whichever provider is cheaper on a given day. Spot instances, too. Lots of possibilities.