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I think this misunderstands the hard part of running AWS. You're paying for the software, sure. What you're really paying for is the hundreds of oncall engineers supporting you at all times, and the culture of ensuring that those services keep working.

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As an Amazon engineer who frequently goes oncall, this is Amazon’s true competitive advantage.

The company works because every night there’s 1000s of engineers sleeping with a pager by their head.

Why do that for general customer support instead of hiring in different time zones?

cultural cohesion?

we have often delayed calls because it's often hard to explain it to some "foreigner"

Because minutes after a metric drops that indicates the possibility of an issue an engineer who probably wrote the code or has the code checked out on their laptop and is intimately familiar with it working on the problem. No waiting for a support team to triage, find the owner, and get ahold of them.

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