Super insightful article for me. It brought together a few concepts in my mind on some work I am doing right now. I cannot believe I never heard of the bandwidth alliance before this.

Your points on IAM/key management and billing are truly the reasons I reach for AWS first and look no where else even when I do not have an egress issue (and I never realized the former influenced my choice so heavily before now). The unified AuthN/Z model is big when all possible tools I would ever need are available under one invoice and security model.