And Toyota is a middleman between you and the raw materials to build a car. I guess it’s obvious that you can build a car cheaper than Toyota? How do the economies of scale fit into this false equivalency of a physics analogy?
Amazon's added value is in bundling open source tools and in provisioning and autoscaling. They don't make hardware, they don't generate electricity, they're not an ISP. They outsource the actual hosting part to other people.
If you just want to host stuff you can cut out the AWS middleman and rent a data center location for much cheaper. (Like, 4-5 or even 10 times cheaper.)
And yes, as a programmer/devops/sysadmin thinking about provisioning, autoscaling and packaging is your job. And yes, you absolutely can do it more efficiently than Amazon, because economies of scale don't apply to IT human resources. (Software projects don't become cheaper to make when you hire more programmers, quite the opposite, in fact.)
