The main competition to AWS is not (or should not be) internal IT, but other cloud providers outside the big 2-3 (Digital Ocean etc.), and dedicated and managed hosting providers. I can usually get a server in less than 24h from a provider like Hetzner, but if I need capacity urgently I can also temporarily spin up cloud instances there.

The biggest issue is not that people want to avoid internal IT and/or want elasticity, but the number of people who never even do a proper cost comparison beyond the top tier most expensive providers.

AWS hasn't been selling itself as a competitor to other clouds for like a decade compared to in-house IT because their market entrance _is_ technology lagging companies. The first demo use cases for, say, SQS back to 2008 were literally failing over databases into the cloud. It wasn't really until Azure that any truly serious attempt to compete cloud to cloud at enterprise scale. For all the HN hype of all the various vendors out there, they're all small fries collectively compared to the many billions of the cloud gorillas like Alibaba, Azure, and AWS. DO, Linode, Vultr, etc. are simply not intended for bureaucracy-laden companies that are the lion's share of the global IT market and also are not even allowed under many enterprise vendor and purchasing agreements (had this problem with several customers' contracts / legal before that would have killed 7+ figure deals).

Most places outside tech hubs put massive emphasis upon being able to swap labor and are technology laggards because their switching costs are so high due to lack of velocity in their work in technology in the first place (and also why waterfall or spiral makes more sense for their efforts rather than Agile probably even today). The irony here is that strong AWS professionals are not cheap in any way, but neither is being dead in the water because your 60+ year old guru graybeard IT guy that managed the racks faithfully for 12+ years retires suddenly.

> AWS hasn't been selling itself as a competitor to other clouds for like a decade

And yet they're handing out $25k-$100k in credits like candy to startups to prevent them from going to Google cloud or Azure.

"Selling" is what I was getting at. When looking at the tail end of the funnel every other vendor is giving away drugs to hook kids when they're young. Tail distribution dealers can't afford to do this in contrast.

Another tell is that the ways to "prove" start-up status under most of the big providers' terms for cloud credit align more around "did you get VC funding?" than "are you small?" due to the longer lead time nature of bootstrapped start-ups. Most don't give you credits if you've been around 2+ years and soured on another provider. Maybe I just sucked at it but I was bootstrapping before and had trouble getting decent credit then.

I have strong evidence of the opposite. I worked in a hedge fund (unnamed for privacy) they paid top $ for IT admins, which by the way were very capable. An incursion into AWS taught them a hard lesson - the were nearly 4-5 more efficient than AWS at similar hosting capacity. Moving to GPC was their only option to maintain elasticity at relatively “acceptable” prices.

My "anecdata" is stronger than your "anecdata", I'd say.

> they paid top $ for IT admins, which by the way were very capable.

Most companies don't pay top dollar and as a result they have to scrape by with the leftovers. As a result Amazon for sure beats them in sysadmining efficiency.