The other thing that would be interesting to look at would be the cost of running an alternative implementation on a more standard platform. What would be the cost of running the same application on AWS VM's, for example?
Is Amazon trying to extract a profit? Unless they are using specialized hardware, can they really execute this service any cheaper than you could? Or do they pad the billing to fund Amazon?
Why would I go with a likely much more expensive option (I'd be pretty surprised if Amazon's billings for this service scale linearly with their costs) instead of the option that provides more traditional cost scaling?
Is Amazon trying to extract a profit? Unless they are using specialized hardware, can they really execute this service any cheaper than you could? Or do they pad the billing to fund Amazon?
Why would I go with a likely much more expensive option (I'd be pretty surprised if Amazon's billings for this service scale linearly with their costs) instead of the option that provides more traditional cost scaling?