Maybe in a perfect world, or in a free market.

But the cloud compute market is basically centralized into 2.5 companies at this point. The point of paying companies like Azure here is that they've in theory centralized the knowledge and know-how of running multiple, distributed datacenters, so as to be resilient.

But that we keep seeing outages encompassing more than a failure domain, then it should be fair game for engineers / customers to ask "what am I paying for, again?"

Moreover, this seems to be a classic case of large barriers to entry (the huge capital costs associated with building out a datacenter) barring new entrants into the market, coupled with "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" level thinking. Are outages like these truly factored into the napkin math that says externalizing this is worth it?