Over the last month, we’ve been interviewing former AWS executives to answer a specific question: in the long run, are AWS’ compute and storage services commoditised?

We’ve covered a range of angles, including:

  1. Why GCP lags behind AWS / Azure with a Former GCP Director
  2. Kubernetes and the risk of porting workloads between clouds
  3. AWS Graviton and hardware-software integration as a competitive advantage

Last week, we published an interview with a Former AWS executive who was responsible for managing data centers that contributed ~33% of AWS’ revenue. The interview explores how to run a hyper scale data center, capacity planning, and server lifetime.

In this analysis, we explore a few interesting points from the interview that address the question of hyperscaler commoditization.

Firstly, the scale of an AWS data center is incredible: each center is ~20,000 square meters, takes 3 years to build, and costs ~$1bn to prepare without the servers:

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