Yeah, and at certain data centers it is as simple as ordering a cross connect. There are many AWS services and each have many use cases where the customer is getting an excellent value. Unfortunately, just like deciphering all of the names is very difficult as OP demonstrated so well, understanding the use cases where you can get a good value as a customer is also esoteric and poorly documented. While AWS has pretty good docs in general for each service. Most of the naive implementations presented in tutorials and docs would not be a valuable reason for a customer to use the service. I wonder if documenting this type of stuff better would help them grow the business or if they just don't care and they want to just rip off as many faces as possible. I guess in traditional enterprise software, this is always the role of the consultants / partners rather than the role of the vendor. The vendor sales guy always just wants you to take the license that puts the most money in his pocket and it is up to those partners and consultants to explain to you how to optimize your usage and licensing.