I don't think I've seen a cloud-first company that spent less engineering time on managing their infrastructure. You just replace one set of work with another.
Those numbers bother me. What does it mean to be "6x cheaper"? Is that a sixth the price? If something costs $100, what is 6x cheaper than it? 2x cheaper? 1x cheaper?
It is as frustrating as when people use "200% faster" to mean exactly the same thing as "twice as fast", and "100% faster" to mean the same thing.
Oh sure, I just mean that wording in particular. 1/6 the cost is clear to me, 6x cheaper is not, because the wording implies that there's some base point that the original price is the "1x cheaper" base point. Like what is 1x cheaper than the base price? The wording is confusing. Then there's the comparative. Is "6x cheaper" the same as "6x as cheap"? Logic says that 6x cheaper would be the same as 7x as cheap, but many very smart people use these interchangeably. Again, like when people say "3x faster" to mean "3x as fast" which means that "50% faster" is actually slower than the reference speed.
It's just a wording annoyance that always gets to me, so it's not a big deal. I always prefer "x% as fast" and "x% the price", because they're largely unambiguous.
A lot are getting ripped off. To what degree depends on their tech capabilities and business savvy (i.e. what would it cost them to do it themselves and what kind of discount can they negotiate from the cloud provider. If you're paying the listed rates you are getting ripped of).
At which monthly spend should we negotiate with AWS for example? And will they check if we are using 25 of their services instead of easily migratable VM-hosted apps?