You must be talking about very early on because it would only have taken a short time spent on practical cloud building to begin realizing that much or even most of what is in "commodity hardware" is there to serve uses cases that cloud providers don't have. Why do servers have redundant power supplies? What is the BMC good for? Who cares about these LEDs? Why would anyone use SAS? Is it very important that rack posts are 19 inches between centers, or was that a totally arbitrary decision made by AT&T 90 years ago? What's the point of 12V or 5V intermediate power rails? Is there a benefit from AC power to the host?
You're not wrong but I would make a distinction between removing features (which requires little or no R&D and saves money immediately) and designing custom ASICs (which requires large upfront R&D and pay off only over time and at large scale).
> realizing that much or even most of what is in "commodity hardware" is there to serve uses cases that cloud providers don't have.
Why wouldn't they have?
E.g.
> Why do servers have redundant power supplies?
So if you lose power you don't lose the whole server? It's even more important for cloud providers that have huge servers with high density. You connect the different power supplies each to an independent power feed so 1 can go down. Would you rather have 2x the capacity instead?
