I know first hand the kind of discounts some companies much, much smaller than Netflix can get, and they are steep. EC2 is still expensive then too, but if you pay, say, a million a year to Amazon without massive discounts, you've not done your job when negotiating.
But yes, someone with the leverage Netflix has will be paying relatively reasonable rates for EC2 services. But pretty much nobody else has the leverage Netflix has.
> I've heard the non-AWS folks talk of these vendor lock ins or long term costs but aren't those irrelevant in 2016+?
Paying far above market rates is never going to be irrelevant, because if you pay above market and your competitor doesn't, chances are they'll have you for breakfast thanks to better margins.
Why in the world would you agree to pay above market rates to get locked in for 1-3 years when you can pay less on a month-by-month contract?
You can run it on AWS or somewhere else but moving is always a problem regardless.
In fact, they don't even use the same hardware or software.
When we looked at S3 for some archiving use cases, that came up as a risk -- if strategically it made more sense for us to adopt Google, Microsoft, etc, we would need to negotiate significant concessions from a new vendor to transition away from Amazon or take a hit during that period. You always need to plan for the exit!
You'll have similar issues on-premises (ie. dealing with EMC/etc), but many people forget that cloud providers have their own gotchas too.
TBH The cost of AWS isn't what concerns me so much as the massive vendor lock-in.
Not only that, but if you invest significantly in any single technology, migrating to another technology is always going to be an extreme effort. Having led migrations from datacenters to AWS, AWS to Digital Ocean, RabbitMQ to NSQ to SNS+SQS, etc., I can say at this point that I do not believe in vendor lock-in as a legitimate reason to disqualify any particular solution.
I've heard the non-AWS folks talk of these vendor lock ins or long term costs but aren't those irrelevant in 2016+? eg. microservices to reduce the issue of vendor lock in and long term costs on infrastructure that goes out of date every 2-3 years is a poor planning indicator no?