I think I must have miscommunicated my position. I'm not reflecting on cloud as whole, but how AWS is particularly vulnerable to a tech sector downturn. In the event of economic downturn, existing cloud customers will optimized costs (pre-cloud they would have avoided infrastructure upgrades, now they will focus on different cost structures). My belief is that generic services, such as storage, compute, ect. will priced like commodities because the market is more efficient since multiple cloud provider have the same service. Tools like terraform allow easy enough cloud configuration porting that cloud providers have little pricing power for these products. One area of cost optimization is to utilize generic cloud resources instead of AWS specific services (where I see many of my costs). Many of the services that generate positive cashflow for AWS seem to be built on top of open source which means that converting existing costly services can be converted to use generic resources with out too much implementation difficulty.

I'm only a developer so I'm sure I'm missing Operations and Business perspectives. Would love to learn more.