That's a great point. Further, there are many sizeable businesses built on top of AWS where they deliver the abstractions with compression that earns them their margin.

Case in point: tell me, from the point of view of the user, how many steps it takes to deploy a NextJS/React ecosystem website with Vercel and with AWS, start to finish.

I think they have plenty of competition in the cloud computing space. It seems fair to say that their strategy of de-prioritizing UI/UX in favor of getting features out the door more quickly and cheaply has benefitted them.

However, I don't think it's fair to say that this trade-off always wins out. Rather, they've carved out their own ecological niche and, for now, they're exploiting it well.

Imagine a native desktop app that let you build a UI with very basic elements, à la Visual Basic, and behind each of those elements is an associated AWS CLI command. Such that "aws s3 ls" attached to a list element would render an account's buckets.

The AWS APIs are so expansive, a product like this could offer a complete replacement for the default web console and maybe even charge for it. Does anyone know if such a solution exists? Perhaps some more generic "shell-to-ui" application? If not, I'm interested in building one if anybody would like to contribute.