AWS has developed a datacentre networking design that uses a flat, single-tier architecture and commodity hardware, aiming to make its infrastructure more resilient and cheaper to operate. The article argues that AWS has not promoted the achievement strongly enough, despite claims that the approach can reduce energy use by up to 40 per cent and is now standard in many new facilities. It matters because networking savings at AWS’s scale could materially affect cloud costs, margins and the environmental footprint of expanding datacentres.

AWS executives acknowledged that much of the resulting efficiency gain has effectively improved the company’s margins rather than being directly passed on to customers. However, the article notes that AWS has generally kept prices unchanged for many existing services since 2020, aside from areas such as public IPv4 addresses and certain GPU capacity products. It also highlights that AWS’s pricing bundles extensive underlying infrastructure, security and operational costs into individual service charges, while newer Graviton-based instance generations have seen only limited price increases.