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Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel by mrkurt on Monday June 22, 2020 @02:53PM (#23604198)
Margin calculations include all that. And I suspect most of AWS's marginal cost is _still_ hardware.

The marginal cost of VPC is basically 0. Otherwise they couldn't sell tiny ec2 instances. The only cost differences between t3.micro and their giant ec2 instances are (a) hardware and (b) power.

Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel by panopticon on Monday June 22, 2020 @03:15PM (#23604746)
> The marginal cost of VPC is basically 0. Otherwise they couldn't sell tiny ec2 instances.

That's not strictly true. They could recoup costs on the more expensive EC2 instances.

I have not idea what the actual split is, but the existence of cheap instances doesn't mean much when Amazon has shown itself willing to be a loss-leader.

Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel by mrkurt on Monday June 22, 2020 @06:53PM (#23607886)
So what you're saying is kind of the opposite of a marginal cost.

If they are recouping their costs, it's a capital expense, and works differently than a marginal cost. AWS's networking was extremely expensive to _build_ but it's not marginally more expensive to _operate_ for each new customer. Servers are relatively cheap to purchase, but as you add customers the cost increases with them.

If they're selling cheap instances are a marginal loss, that would be very surprising and go against everything I know about the costs of building out datacenters and networks.