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px1999

The fourth stage doesn't even involve owning your own infrastructure.

We pay a 3rd party for our AWS (and Azure) usage to get better rates than AWS would give us (and without a commitment to increased spend like AWS reps have tried to push for Amazon's available programs).

I wouldn't be surprised if they just used volume discounts / negotiated pricing and reservations at their end to make it massively profitable for them.

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I think SPOT (pre-emptable) instances are an under appreciated resource in AWS. Technically they can get pulled back at any time but in practice it’s only happened to me once, for a single instance. I’ve lost far more instances to hardware failures in the same period. If you can get your head around that then you can save more money with SPOT plans then any of the regular compute plans. AWS also does an auction for SPOT instances which can push the price really low for ARM and previous generation instances whereas other clouds just give you a set discount when using them.

If you've only had a spot instance pre-empted from you once then you haven't used them very much. We have a very elastic workload that can scale up to a few hundred spot instances and it's not uncommon to see tens of them yanked out from under us at once.

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