[DVassallo]

It's an opportunity cost. Since they can't have infinite employees, their current employees are better allocated to other things.

[usr1106]

For them it's 0.00...1% of their business. For a small customer who deployed on their service it might be 30% or more of their development budget. Of course that's the way corporations do business. But that's why as a small one you can't really trust any of them. You can just place bets and sometimes you lose.

[adamc]

To put it another way, it is an implicit cost of using AWS: You have to have contingency plans to cope with discontinued services, and you need to be able to realistically execute those plans. I think it is just another reason that AWS isn't as good a deal as it might initially appear to be for small businesses. (Larger organizations may have a better chance of amortizing these costs over many projects.)