Amazon, Microsoft offer little relief to small cloud clients

By mid-March, John Lyotier’s travel software business Left was cratering with the spread of the pandemic. Seeking to cut costs, he reached out to his office landlord, who offered rent relief. Then he contacted Amazon, asking to “explore creative financing opportunities” for his monthly cloud-computing bill. The response was succinct. “’Nope, that’s the way it is,’” Lyotier recalled.The ability to rent computing power online has revolutionized the internet economy and turned a trio of companies -- Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google into the indispensable utilities of the web. The trio was expected to generate annual cloud revenue of more than $60 billion before greater demand from stay-at-home orders turned the cloud businesses into one of the bright spots in the collapsing U.S. economy.With the economic devastation of Covid-19, entrepreneurs like Lyotier feel the fate of their businesses rests on the benevolence of their cloud provider. While Amazon Web Services, or AWS, and Microsoft are restructuring some large contracts on a case-by-case basis, according to people familiar with the decisions, smaller companies aren’t receiving the same flexibility. Half a dozen startup executives said recent appeals to these cloud companies have gone unanswered.