I did manage to approach his costs by running a sharded cluster with our largest configuration (M600 nodes with 640GB RAM. 4TB storage and 3.8m IOPS).
That is priced quite clearly on the bottom page at 102.49 USD an hour.
That is priced quite clearly on the bottom page at 102.49 USD an hour.
So in this service the actual cost of the hardware is a rounding error. It also needs power, cooling, a roof and some maintenance crew, but that still doesn't come close to the rental price. So what are customers actually paying for?