Small companies are terrible at working together, even when it's in their best interests.
Can any single customer smaller than the US government get a policy change at Amazon by threatening to walk away?
Very unlikely to happen because of fees, but plausible if the customer is high-profile enough that news about the move damage the reputation of the service provider.
Usually the new provider will advertise the win in such a way it highlights their competitive advantages. This can be extremely painful for the company that lost the very high profile brand.
I'd put Netflix up there as a first candidate...
Are they still a pure AWS house? I'd expect that, at their scale, they'd have boxes and VMs everywhere the round-trip time justifies.
They use AWS for everything except content delivery which is handled by their Open Connect content delivery system that they built and operate. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
Interesting. For a moment I thought they would aggressively optimize encoding for frame cost but then I realized that's probably a rounding error compared to their costs in storage and co-located infrastructure.
They have boxes at every major ISP borders, but they're solely caching infrastructure.
They publicly advertise this under the "Netflix Open Connect" initiative:
- this is hopelessly naïve. Lock-in occurs when you no longer can generate the capex to resolve the opex drain that a vendor squeezing you has created. If any vendor realises that you can raise the capex to get off them then they will raise the opex demand to the point of financial viability to maximise their returns and to ensure future returns (because by doing this they underline their control)
Vendors can't help doing this, it's natural. Also it's their duty to their shareholders.
Our responsibility is to NEVER get into this situation.