Unless you’re planning for the possibility of AWS dropping offline permanently with little to no notice, it really feels like you’re just paying a huge insurance premium. Like any insurance, it’s down to whether you need insurance or could cover the loss. Whether you’d rather incur a smaller ongoing cost to avoid the possibility of a large one time loss.

If AWS suddenly raised their prices 10x overnight, it would hurt but not be an existential threat for most companies. At that point they could invest six months or a year into migrating off of AWS.

Rough numbers that would end up costing us like $4m in cloud spend and staff if we retasked the entire org to accomplishing that for a year.

There’s certainly an opportunity cost as well, but I’d argue it’s not dissimilar to the opportunity cost we’d have been paying all along to maintain compatibility with multiple clouds.

Obviously it’s just conjecture, but my gut says the increased velocity of working on a single cloud and using existing Amazon services and tools where appropriate has made us significantly more than the costs of something that may never happen.