it isn't cheap, so i am not surprised its a cash cow
We are using AWS for a project instead of doing it in house as some of suggested and presented to the powers that be. Some people really really really really wanted to use AWS instead, and made many wrong assumptions that we knew to be wrong where they would save all kinds of money, on top of it being better since its cloud. Lots of magical thinking.
There have been surprise costs around every corner, and now its on track to be double or more than we had even thought it would be in a worst case scenario.
The great windfall from all this cloud success is that as a customer, all the hardware vendors are falling over backwards to drop their prices to keep us buying our own gear instead of using the cloud.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
