It's compelling, but the switching costs away from AWS are quite high, aka good ole' vendor lock-in. I'd love some new EC2 instance types that don't force me to use EBS for root, but the switching cost away from EC2 is so high that, sigh, whatever.
If there were a drop in replacement for EC2 that didn't force me to use EBS for root, I'd switch in a heartbeat, but because of vendor lock-in, EC2 doesn't have to compete on quality, features, nor cost. It's simply because switching is (currently) too expensive. This is a feature that I, a customer, wants; the reason I want this is besides the point. To borrow from the auto industry, you can have use root, as long as it's EBS.
Pretending Amazon doesn't use vendor lock-in to it's own advantage like every other company, and thinking that it really competes on quality, features and cost ignores the huge inertia of saying on what works.
Private, back-room, "don't tell anyone else I gave you that good of a price"-type enterprise sales tactics for "at-scale" pricing don't engender trust either. Great for business; not for encouraging competition.
Yeah but few people do that because building massive infrastructure on top of EC2 instead of using Amazon's managed alternatives is a great way to lose money, not just on the AWS bill itself but also on needless additional work for your architects.
Defeating vendor lock-in requires the development of sound cloud-resource primitives, and probably some regulation on part of government to not pay egress costs when switching to a competitor (since the high cost of moving your data to another cloud is anti-competitive). But nobody has come up with decent primitives because, you know, if AmaGooSoft don't need multi-cloud architectures for high availability, then why do you think you do? And government won't step in because none of the regulators understand how any of this works.
If there were a drop in replacement for EC2 that didn't force me to use EBS for root, I'd switch in a heartbeat, but because of vendor lock-in, EC2 doesn't have to compete on quality, features, nor cost. It's simply because switching is (currently) too expensive. This is a feature that I, a customer, wants; the reason I want this is besides the point. To borrow from the auto industry, you can have use root, as long as it's EBS.
Pretending Amazon doesn't use vendor lock-in to it's own advantage like every other company, and thinking that it really competes on quality, features and cost ignores the huge inertia of saying on what works.
Private, back-room, "don't tell anyone else I gave you that good of a price"-type enterprise sales tactics for "at-scale" pricing don't engender trust either. Great for business; not for encouraging competition.