The author sounds a bit scared. Maybe the recent wave of "we can save $$$ by leaving AWS" articles have them rattled?<p>Yes, multi-tenancy and improved hw utilization can save money ... <i>for Amazon</i>. That's of no use if they lack sufficient competition and just capture the savings as profits. Then you're just wasting time on debugging weird contention issues and cloud cost optimization consultants so Bezos can get richer.<p>The profit margins on AWS are so huge that even though you they can binpack better it often doesn't matter, you're going to still save money by going to either a cheaper cloud or using your own HW (or renting your own dedicated HW). The savings from multi-tenancy are drowned by the added costs.<p>One intriguing model that might be worth exploring is micro-clouds. In that model there's a kind of clearing market, and users with strong diurnal cycles and not many batch jobs can re-sell their CPU capacity at night to other users. They just implement some Lambda-ish API and configure the kernels/hypervisors to always prioritize their own jobs over guests. The guests don't care because they're getting the resources cheap, for the company the additional income offsets the cost of their own machines and the market takes a cut. The difference vs today's cloud models is it's more decentralized and the "cloud provider" is really just a match maker, so it's easy to set up competitors and margins would be low.