all amazon services seem so expensive, hundreds of dollars/ month bills easily for running a few large ec2 servers all month.
Also, while you definitely pay a markup, the standard EC2 pricing also contains instant availability. If you skip on buying a car and instead pay a taxi to wait 24/7, your costs will also be insanely high. Additionally, AWS provides a great ecosystem where your app can easily be managed in - things like getting a https certificate, setting up a redundant load balancer and even a CDN, database or a Kubernetes cluster can be made simply with a few clicks in an UI. If you don't have someone who knows how to configure those services, it can detract a lot from what you're actually trying to do as a business. Lastly, it has all these enterprise features you suddenly need - solid billing, encryption, certificates etc..
Don't get me wrong, it's expensive, but there's a reason so many businesses use AWS.
we use aws at work, but been running side projects on digital ocean for years for way less than hundreds a month
Disk is cheap. Real cheap.
Perhaps irrational but can't argue with the peace of mind that expensive clouds offer. Although we've seen misconfigured S3 buckets leaking data so.
The big players leverage their understanding of science and well paid lawyers to play a cognitive game where investment in storage is set aside, as storage is “a solved problem”, they collude to focus government spend on new things they can charge consumers for after charging us via taxes and agency, to build it.
Good luck finding a VC willing to compete against Bezos. They’re not going to target the guy managing the infra risk, providing a cheap platform key to their cheap startup gambling. They’re going to target naive college kids to try and build a rocket for them. Because VCs are smarter than Bezos; do none of the work, own the reward.
The big players know that what separates the majors from the minors is trust. If you buy from AWS, you know what you get works, and you will pay a premium for that assurance. And also it is really fricking expensive to be AWS.
That said, there is a lot of AWS that I probably wouldn't know existed - I know in my day job I make big use of maybe five services, plus maybe another 10 glue services between them (CloudWatch, IAM, VPC etc).