If a company needs an almost commodity software, like most companies, it's clear that over the long term, AWS will win on reliability and probably price over an AWS startup.

So why choose differently ?

Because AWS knows that many of their customers think like this and pursues ever more minimal Minimum Viable Products accordingly. Their quality is dismal and it stays that way over the long term.

AWS's killer feature has nothing to do with tech, it's the smooth billing process (techies choose, management pays and supervises). If you can put together a smooth process for paying for 3rd party software in your organization, you can unlock massive improvements in quality for a pittance.

There is nothing smooth about AWS's billing; it's notoriously byzantine, and so difficult to interpret that there are multiple third-party services whose entire offering is based on ingesting and parsing your AWS bill.

The value of AWS billing isn't that it's easy, it's that the spending decisions are in the hands of the right people so software development moves faster.

Yes, exactly. The billing tools are awful, have always been awful, and will always be awful, but bad tooling can be worked around much more readily than bad bureaucracy.

I would argue the killer feature is actually IAM: technically better than anything any other vendor offers, even if there are a million and one problems with it and not a single annoyance has been fixed since 2013.

I could see that.

I almost mentioned IAM in my post as a co-killer-feature, but I've only ever witnessed its power in AWS learning material / conferences, not being leveraged IRL, so I decided not to speculate. I'm more dev than ops, so even though I've seen a decent number of AWS environments the fact that they have all used IAM in a clumsy, coarse manner doesn't really mean much.

Do you have a feel for how frequently ops manages to actually leverage the fine-grained power features in IAM?

Essentially every large scale environment I’ve seen (as an ex-core maintainer of Terraform, that is quite a few) either does an ok job of this or has projects to do better.

The issue I have with IAM is that it is not possible to be sufficiently fine grained - for example I cannot grant an instance permission to read its own tag values but not those of other instances, since the EC2 IAM API is stuck in the state of 85% done at which most AWS services eventually seem to plateau.

> AWS will win on reliability and probably price over an AWS startup

From my experience, Snowflake is both more performant AND cheaper than Redshift or other RDS options from AWS.