> That is not AWS's intent.
To clarify, I’m not talking about intent or “wants” in any way.
(If you are speaking of AWS’s intent, do you have some kind of privileged knowledge of what AWS “wants” to do?)
> And its FUD to suggest that somehow cloud vendors want to make money out of reliability.
Let’s forget about what AWS “wants”.
I think that AWS deserves to make money for making reliable services, and that it is right to pay them more money to get more reliability. This is not FUD, this is how business works. When I am working with a cloud provider to host my services, I am not trying to extract the most favorable terms possible—I want a deal where both parties are making money. If AWS is not making money from reliability, then that means, conversely, that I can’t buy it from them (more or less—this is a simplification).
And you can see that reliability is all over AWS’s marketing materials, because reliability is important to AWS’s customers.
> For example, in AWS, a webapp with a single Region approach using multiple AZs will give you higher availablility, but similar costs to a single AZ approach.
Reliability is more than just a collection of IaaS products wired together. The fact that two particular configurations have similar price points is not informative.
Single-region, multi-AZ is great for a large percentage of customers. When that’s not enough, you pay more money, and you should do some modeling of system availability because there are plenty of categories of errors that will now prevent you from reaching those higher availability targets.