This is one of the reasons I love AWS. Sure things some may be priced higher than alternatives (cough bandwidth!!) but I don't recall prices ever rising. Once you build something sustainable, your marginal costs only go down over time.
At AWS, the bandwidth is the soda. They mark it up 18x over market rate. The more successful you are, the more you pay for it.
That's their business model. They trap you into "cheap prices", and then hit you over the head for the rest of your life with bandwidth costs. They know that it's too hard to leave, so you won't do it.
I can get bandwidth on the market for about $0.013-$0.005 cents per gigabyte. Think about that. That's how much more expensive these cloud services are on BW costs.
Examples:
1. http://fortune.com/2016/01/08/google-amazon-cloud-price-war/
2. https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/09/google-cloud-platforms-pre...
3. Google's Sustained Use Discounts vs AWS RIs
Big +1 on that one.
Getting reserved instance correct always feels like a form of voodoo mathematics (I want to save money but what if we scale?!).
The old light/medium/heavy was odd enough but the new no/some/full upfront is a effectively usury. You're agreeing to pay the whole thing regardless of the up front amount so the other two options are effectively a high interest loan to buy the full upfront fee.
[insert pedantic "VMware doesn't compete with AWS" arguments here]
Sorry if that wasn't clear. I meant the initial prices for their competitors are less, not that the competitors raise their prices.
AWS may be more to start with but it's a known entity that can be factored into considering the feasibility of an idea. If X is feasible given current prices, it'll continue to be feasible and possibly more so when prices drop further.
