A lot of the value of AWS is its integration within itself. (even if it can be full of rough edges). I think the danger with unbundling is that your competing project needs to be clearly so much better that people are going to be willing to go through the hassle of configuring a lot of complicated networking to work with what they already have, along with separate billing etc. Not saying it can't be done, but it means the barrier to entry is really really high. You're not just convincing them your service is better, you're also convincing them that it's so much better that they should be willing to take on extra headaches for it.<p>If I were to compete with aws, I think the area I'd really go after them with is better kubernetes support. I've yet to see any cloud provider really do it well, to be honest (which isn't surprising, development on kubernetes moves so fast and it's so advanced, it's kind of amazing, but that does mean it's really hard to make it nice outside of a "works for a demo" kind of deal). Azure and GCP do kubernetes a little bit better, but I think if someone were to come in and say, like, I don't know, we can do kubernetes on bare metal so it's much faster than through a VM, and all our services are natively integrated, that would be a cool story.<p>The other area I might compete with AWS is in finding niches where organizations might be hesitant to build an operations department, but they really need cloud computing. So, for instance, maybe scientific computing or something like that. If you could make a really useful cloud that can be administered by someone who barely knows linux, that could be a thing.