Another useful comment from the thread:
> Makes sense for both parties.
> For AWS, it allows them to make hardware investments early on
> For Pinterest - it allows them to keep costs manageable and get a significant discount on MSRP
~$400M/year, for a company with negative income so far
(Provided you know what you're doing.)
Probaly a case of vendor lock-in.
AWS is a middle man in the hosting business. Sometimes it's okay, but you can't cheat the fact that Amazon has to take their cut.
(This might change in the future when FAANG privatizes the global Internet for their own use, but we're not there yet today.)
Amazon's added value is in bundling open source tools and in provisioning and autoscaling. They don't make hardware, they don't generate electricity, they're not an ISP. They outsource the actual hosting part to other people.
If you just want to host stuff you can cut out the AWS middleman and rent a data center location for much cheaper. (Like, 4-5 or even 10 times cheaper.)
And yes, as a programmer/devops/sysadmin thinking about provisioning, autoscaling and packaging is your job. And yes, you absolutely can do it more efficiently than Amazon, because economies of scale don't apply to IT human resources. (Software projects don't become cheaper to make when you hire more programmers, quite the opposite, in fact.)
I can't imagine this deal (signed in April 2021) has that much impact on either AWS's hardware budget or their usage projections.