I think AWS knows that the best it can do is offer so much combined value that people don't want to leave the ecosystem. It's the same play that Amazon has used for Prime. If Prime were just shopping, people could leave Prime for Walmart+ or Target/Shipt. Instead, Prime is a service that keeps lots of touch points. You essentially get a free streaming service in Prime Video (included with your retail shipping thing) or you get a free shipping service (included with your video streaming); you get some perks on Twitch; you get a music streaming service that doesn't include all music, but has a lot for free (with no ads) and the potential for Music Unlimited for 20% less than Spotify/Apple Music.

If you can get the same value from another ecosystem, you might leave for a better price. If you can't get the same value from another ecosystem, you won't leave. If you're locked into proprietary AWS systems, it might require a lot of work to migrate.

I do get where the author is coming from with RedShift and Snowflake. I think it's reasonable to look at AWS's data warehouse position and Snowflake's success and see a bit of a failure on AWS's part. However, I think that Snowflake represents a threat to AWS. If all services above the infrastructure became like Snowflake, I could more easily move from AWS to GCP or Azure.

I'd note that it isn't just about companies who will switch cloud providers. It's about whether a company can credibly threaten that they might switch cloud providers. If I'm negotiating with AWS and they see that I'm using SQS, Lambda, RedShift, Timestream, Kenesis, and other proprietary AWS stuff, they know that my threat to leave AWS is hollow. I'd have to rewrite too much infrastructure. Sure, maybe I could replace SQS with Kafka, but it isn't a drop-in replacement. Sure, there are other time-series databases than Timestream, but it's going to require engineering time to migrate.

Yes, even in a world where all the software is the same on top of the infrastructure, it would take time and money to migrate to a different cloud, but it would be less time and money. That "less time and money" means that AWS needs to be more price competitive and it gives me more negotiating power. The harder it is to leave AWS, the more leverage that Amazon has in negotiations. Companies like Spotify and Snap spend hundreds of millions on their cloud services each year. They ink major deals that they negotiate. If they rely on lots of proprietary AWS or GCP systems, it makes it a lot harder to leave - which leave the cloud provider with the leverage when the contract comes up for renewal.