'Amazon are worse than Microsoft' and offer 'Ryanair pricing' for services says UK healthcare firm
"There's a price for removing a bit from here to here… and a price for moving it back again"
"Amazon are worse than Microsoft" and offer a "Ryanair pricing" model that charges for every tiny service adjustment, a UK healthcare firm has complained while taking part in a Computing Research survey.
The firm's representative, while being interviewed for a study on cloud and infrastructure, initially commented that cloud was, compared to on-premise services, "easier, more flexible and certainly agile", praising the cloud generally for offering "way lower" costs than running one's own in-house platforms and infrastructure.
The healthcare provider than added that cloud "may change the balance in capex and opex".
"But we've still got to find the money in the first place and then depreciate it," they added, before launching an attack on Amazon.
"There is a tendency - certainly Amazon are worse than Microsoft - of a sort of Ryanair pricing of services, so there's a price for removing a bit from here to here, and there's a price for moving it back again..." the provider said.
The "Ryanair" allusion seems to be a reference to the airline's habit of adding ‘stealth' costs to baggage, seating and food when customers are already committed to a journey.
AWS likes to make a big noise about how 'competitive' its pricing is, having engaged in price wars with both Google and Microsoft as far back as 2014, as well as introducing Redshift as an even more low-cost focused data warehousing service in 2012.
Andy Jassy, who is now CEO of AWS, said at the time:
"As we are able to continue to innovate on our infrastructure, we are able to get better economies of scale which lets us lower our infrastructure costs and lower prices."
However, following Apple's iCloud hack and outages, rumours emerged that Apple may have dumped AWS and moved to Google for a huge part of its hosting needs.
The debate as to whether cheap can ever be 'too cheap' is an ongoing one as cloud providers fight for the business of organisations who are preparing to go - just like Netflix (with AWS) earlier this year - truly all-cloud.