Given a choice between being “locked in” to a major cloud provider and trusting your business to a randomish little company, you are never going to get a compliance department to go for the latter. “no one ever got fired for choosing AWS”.

This is the API - it’s basically the same for all supported languages

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/code-library/latest/ug/python_3_...

Real companies aren’t concerned about cost as much as working with other real companies, compliance, etc and are comparing cost or opportunities between doing a thing and not doing a thing.

One of my specialties is call centers. Every call deflected by using AI vs talking to a human agent can save from $5 - $15.

Even saving money by allowing your cheaper human agents to handle a problem where they are using AI in the background, can save money. $15 saved can buy a lot of inference.

And the lock in boogeyman is something only geeks care about. Migrations from one provider to another costs so much money at even a medium scale they are hardly ever worth it between the costs, distractions from doing value added work, and risks of regressions and downtime.

> And the lock in boogeyman is something only geeks care about. Migrations from one provider to another costs so much money...

You just gave the definition of lock in.

You are “locked in” to your infrastructure if you have a bunch of VMs at your colo and you need to move.

Do you also suggest that people never use a Colo?

I’ve seen it take a year to move a bunch of VMs from a Colo.

Bedrock is a lot more than just a standard endpoint. Also, the security guarantees.

on less vendor to vet, one less contract to negotiate, one less 3rd party system to administer. you're already locked into AWS anyway. integrates with other AWS services. access control is already figured out.

99% of people who use it do so because of A. existing agreements wrt compliance and billing (including credits, spend agreements etc.) B. IAM/org permissioning structures that they already have set up.

> Isn't the API worse

No, for general inference the norm is to use provider-agnostic libraries that paper over individual differences. And if you're doing non-standard stuff? Throw the APIs at Opus or something.

> Aren't the p95 latencies worse?

> The costs higher?

The costs for Anthropic models are the same, and the p95 latencies are not higher, they're more stable if anything. The open weights models do look a bit more expensive but as said many businesses don't pay sticker price for AWS spend or they find it worth it anyway.