False equivalence/moving goalposts IMO... I was only refuting your claim of "AWS is not cheap", as if it's somehow impossible for it to be cheap... which I'm saying isn't the case.

Sorry to jump in y'alls convo :) AWS is cheaper than the Cloud we built... I just don't think it's significant. Ours cost more because businesses/governments would pay it, not because it was optimal.

Price is beside my original point: Amazon has enjoyed decades for arbitrage. This sounds more accusatory than intended: the 'us-south-1' problem exists because it's allowed/chosen. Created in 2006!

Now, to retract that a bit: I could see technical debt/culture making this state of affairs practical, if not inevitable. Correct? No, if I was Papa Bezos I'd be incredibly upset my Supercomputer is so hamstrung. I think even the warehouses were impacted!

The real differentiator was policy/procedure. Nobody was allowed to create a service or integration with this kind of blast area. Design principles, to say the least. Fault zones and availability zones exist for a reason beyond capacity, after all.