I'm going to beat its reliability (and successfully do so) because the complexity of my stack is less than 1% of Amazon's. I have way less moving parts (and complex interactions between them) to worry about than Amazon. My only liability is hardware failure, and it turns out that stuff has gotten pretty reliable nowadays.
Am I able to beat Amazon on their wide range of services? Absolutely not - if you're looking for FAANG-level scale, you're talking to the wrong person. But for the handful of services I do need (HTTP LB, app servers, relational database and cache), I beat them because I only need to deliver very specific services and can schedule the risky operations (maintenance, hardware upgrades, etc) around my business' needs, something AWS can't do because as a global provider any time they pick for maintenance would inevitably clash with someone's business-critical hours. Turns out most companies also only require a small chunk of what AWS offers, so the rest of the AWS control plane's complexity and its global scale is actually a major liability.
> AWS has over a decade of experience and a ton of full-time dev ops to make complicated cloud usage easy.
And yet that one time a client's RDS instance ran out of disk space, it got stuck in "modifying" for 12+ hours (I assume an AWS operator eventually manually logged in and fixed it) with no way for us to recover, forcing us to restore a backup and reconstruct missing data from logs to bring our service back online in a timely manner.
Would it fail the same way on bare-metal? Yes, but at least I can SSH in and fix it immediately. Not to mention, the only reason it ran out of space is because AWS' pricing forced us to be very conservative with storage, where as the bare-metal machines I rent - for far cheaper than AWS' offerings - come with terabytes of storage as standard so this incident would've never happened to begin with.