My guess, the CFO showed that using AWS saves the company a few cents to a fraction of a cent per what ever unit they measure by. Those few cents to a fraction of a cent add up when multiplied by the millions or hundreds of millions of units and that savings makes the CEO look like they are more profitable and can give shareholders more profit.
When everything is about the quarterly results and the need to always show growth so the board and shareholders don’t fire you, you’ll cut corners and take the risk, as long as it has the potential to make you look good.
sobchak@programming.dev 5 months ago
For these large businesses, I imagine they get favorable deals, and all the executives probably know each other and scratch each-other’s backs. For smaller businesses, AWS can decrease time-to-market, it’s easy to find people who are already familiar with it, and is seen as less risky than going with some smaller provider. Though, I hate the “cloud” with a passion, and whenever I’m given the choice, I avoid it. It’s quite a bit cheaper in the long run to avoid cloud providers too. On one long project I worked on, we hadn’t had downtime on any of our VPSs longer than a couple minutes over the course of 8 years.