And if you are spending your time and resources trying to replicate it instead of building your core product you're an idiot/forever software engineer clueless about product.

I wasn't referring to the edge network for _startups_ to replicate. I was more wondering how AWS and others can replicate Vercel/Netlify and eat their lunch. They have no defensible moat as a company.

The same reason IBM can’t. They are incumbent and have an enterprise world view. They are necessarily going to be more bloaty. IAM yay!

I use Vercel (and Netlify) and once you spend the 2 minutes setting it up you never think much of it again as it just does its job.

Vercel makes app deployment a first-class citizen that's baked into the CDN. Fastly doesn't offer a Vercel/Netlify deploy feature, and AWS requires considerably more work to setup but can easily replicate.