If restaurants ran like AWS...

It’s 2029, and Amazon is taking the restaurant industry into the cloud with its new line of kitchen services - AKS. These shared kitchens can cook and deliver your food in 32 cities all over the world. Just upload your recipes and start taking orders.

As a talented chef, the thought of serving food to people all over the world is exhilarating - global scale! You sign up, start reading the docs and porting recipes to fit these new robotic cloud kitchens. It’s more involved than you expected (maybe a lot more, actually), but you’re motivated and plough ahead. Besides, you make pizzas, all you really need is an oven.

Elastic Oven Service (EOS)

AKS features 122 oven models with over 900 configurations to meet all your baking needs!

Your main considerations are rack area, rack height, and temperature. You don't specify custom dimensions, but rather choose from available presets. Rack area is coupled to height, with some ovens configured for sheets, others for casserole dishes, and others for large roasting pots. Once you know the size of your dish, you can look for temperatures that support your size. Higher temperatures generally have higher cost per hour, but your cook times will be faster, so you can try to optimize your recipes for the best balance of time and heat.

Broiler ovens are priced a little differently. You accumulate credits while baking with the broiler off, and can then use those credits to finish a dish with the broiler on. If you need the broiler on but don't have credits, it's more cost effective to just choose a model with a higher temperature.

Convection heating requires a license. You can buy a license directly from the manufacturer, but for a small premium, you can purchase the license through AKS.

Note that you're sharing the ovens with other chefs. If you need to be 100% certain that no allergens or fumes contaminate your dishes, you can rent a dedicated oven at a price point that reflects your exclusivity.

Even with shared ovens, renting on demand can be expensive. AKS has several pricing options to keep your costs down. If you can commit to buying space in a specific oven every hour for at least a year, whether you use it or not, then reserved ovens are right for you. Alternatively, you can rent oven space from the pool of spare capacity. These rates are the cheapest, but your dishes can be removed from the oven before they're finished if demand increases.

Well, hopefully that's the hardest part. You're probably not optimized for cost or speed, but there will be time to figure it out later. Now you need to sort out ingredients.

It turns out your sauce supplier already ships to AKS. In fact, lots of suppliers do - what an amazing ecosystem! You are responsible for storage though.

Simple Pantry Service (SPS)

AKS provides pantry and cellar services at a variety of price points.

Dry ingredients can be stored in the pantry for $0.023 per kilogram-month. Receiving a shipment incurs a fee of $0.005 per 1,000 items unloaded. When taking an item out of the pantry, there's a small retrieval fee of $0.0004 per 1,000 items, plus any applicable transport fees (see Transport).

If you have ingredients that are only used daily or weekly, they can be stored on the upper shelves at half price. However, using the upper shelves incurs a ladder fee of $0.01 per 1,000 items in, and $0.001 per 1,000 items out. A ladder safety fee of $0.01 per kg is also applied.

For seasonal recipes, you can move ingredients to the cellar. Cellar storage has three levels and can be much cheaper, but you'll need to decide how fast you want to retrieve items before choosing a level. Level one storage can be fetched in milliseconds, but retrieval fees can be 1000x that of the pantry. Getting to level two and back takes minutes to hours, and level three takes 12 hours but is 20x cheaper than pantry storage.

All together, there's 11 different dry storage options, each with up to 6 different fees. Feeling overwhelmed? An AI pantry chef can decide where to put the ingredients for you. It's not free, but it will buy you some time to figure out the rest of the kitchen.

Inventory is a little bit extra.

Simple!

It's hard to tell, but you're pretty sure dry storage is cheap enough not to worry about yet. You tackle the dough prep next.

It looks like there are a few options. Robotic prep chefs can handle just about any prep tasks, but they'll require rigorous instructions and extensive testing. You could always ship pre-made dough to AKS, but dough is important, and the logistics would sort of defeat the purpose of these magic new cloud kitchens. Fortunately, dough is a common enough problem that AKS offers a service.

Managed Dough Service (MDS)

Doughn't stress. When you need to knead, you need MDS.

Dough is metered in Dough Processing Units (DPUs). A DPU can be accumulated in each of the following ways:

1 fold
90 degrees turned
10 grams of dry ingredients processed * (1 + (hydration level / 100))

Every hour, DPUs are tallied for each category and the greatest value determines the DPUs you are charged for that hour.

There is also a flat hourly rate for each instance of MDS that you provision. MDS can autoscale up to large amounts of dough, so you probably only need one instance per city, but feel free to configure as many as you want.

Dough prep, check. You still need to pick the right proofing oven with humidity control, but at least you're now somewhat familiar with the nuances of the oven service. What's next?

Toppings are a unique challenge. People want pizzas ASAP. You decide to prep and portion your veggies, meats, and cheeses daily, but they'll need to be refrigerated and quickly fetched as orders come in. AKS has you covered.

Refrigerated Portion Service (RPS)

RPS is a sophisticated ingredient categorization and retrieval system. By pre-portioning your fresh components, you can ensure your orders will fly off the line!

Portioned components are separated into their own drawers. They are combined at order time, so you can fulfill multiple types of orders with the same basic components (See AKS Dinermo if you prefer to prep by recipe instead of by component).

Think of RPS pricing as a combination of our Pantry and Oven services. You'll be billed for the temperature and size options you choose like an oven, and also pay ingress, storage, and egress fees by weight like the pantry.

RPS is a highly technical system and needs continual updates. You may need to rewrite your recipe instructions after a major update, but AKS allows you to keep your old recipes on outdated systems for up to three years. Outdated fridges cost an extra $73.00 per month for years 1-2, and an extra $146.00 per month for year 3. These charges are automatically applied if you take no action.

To prevent spoilage in the rare case of a power outage, AKS recommends renting a backup generator.

There's been a few setbacks. You almost gave up trying to get the prep robots to hand-toss your dough, but you persevered and the finish line is in sight. You can taste those cloud pizzas and they're fluffy and delicious. One last hurdle - your BBQ pizza needs the chicken cooked to order and added at the end so it doesn't dry out.

AKS Stovetop

At AKS, our robotic line cooks can quickfire your sautés, stir-fries, proteins, and anything else you need à la minute.

Stovetop usage is billed by the second. You won't be charged while your pan comes up to temp, but note your orders will have a delay when starting from a cold pan. You might consider preventing this delay by paying to keep one or more pans warm, especially during the dinner rush.

Gas burners have a rate of $0.0000133334 per cm²-second, while induction burners cost $0.0000166667 per cm²-second.

A stirring fee of $0.0000000309 per gram-second will also be applied.

You've deployed these recipes and are starting to take your first orders - Vamos! Some of the early customers are complaining about undercooked crust - No vamos! You remember one of the test pizzas being a little under, but the rest have been perfect. It's time to put some quality controls in place to figure out the root cause.

AKS ChefWatch

Imagine observing every station in your kitchen at once - that's the power of ChefWatch. AKS has solutions for both real-time monitoring and after-service troubleshooting.

Temperatures are collected from every station at 5-minute intervals for no cost. Turn on detailed monitoring to record temps every minute for just $0.30 per station per month. Enhanced monitoring can probe your food's internal temperature in up to 100 places at once for $0.21 per million readings.

Custom metrics can also be defined for each station. Humidity level, stir frequency, viscosity, etc. Detailed monitoring rates apply.

Once you've configured your metrics, you can define alarms to alert you of service issues in real time. You might be tempted to put alarms on everything. You certainly can, but it will cost you. It's probably best to allow for some smoke and focus on the fires.

Prep stations can be particularly troublesome. PrepPics lets you take a snapshot of your station after each step. Several resolution options are available. Snapshots cost $0.50 per GB, plus $0.03 per GB-month for storage.

If snapshots aren't enough, Prep Insights can record live video from each of your stations. Snapshot rates apply. See AKS Kitchenesis for streaming options and rates.

You discover that a few of the sauce cans separated so the first spoonfuls were extra watery. You add a step to shake them up. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, there's demand for build-your-own pizzas. That's going to take some tinkering. You realize that you can't really experiment on your production line, so you spin up another virtual kitchen to isolate your testing. It shouldn't cost too much to fire some test pizzas, but you seem to remember reading about flat rates on some services, so those expenses will double.

Six months in, you're scaling quickly, and it's time to do some cost analysis. Yikes, you're actually losing about $3.00 per pizza. Where are all the charges coming from? Nothing on the bill looks all that unreasonable, although there are 134 total line items. You recognize the first 20 or so from using the AKS pricing estimator. The long tail is a killer though - 100+ unexpected items ranging from $0.06 to $600.00.

Ok, you forgot to turn off a couple of test ovens. That's kind of on you (a warning would have been nice). ChefWatch seems way too expensive, but how can you justify cutting corners on quality control, especially when you're still finding issues?

A bunch of the charges seem related to ingredient transport. You didn't include those in your estimates. Wait a minute, moving ingredients from prep stations back to the pantry was supposed to be free. Ah, only if you specify use of the free conveyors in your instructions. Dammit, you don't have time to pore through 100,000+ pages of AKS docs.

Your head is starting to sizzle like your four-cheese blend, so you ask around for help. You hear about an alternative model for cloud kitchens. They're not as flexible, but as long as you stick to common ingredients and techniques, they should just work. Do you double down in AKS or do you make the switch to a Pizza-as-a-Service? People are complaining that PaaS pricing is even higher. That makes sense - PaaS offerings are built on top of AKS, so surely sticking with AKS will be cheaper once you figure out all the tricks.

As the decision fatigue sets in, you get an email offering 10,000 credits to switch to Microsoft Universal Cloud Kitchen (MUCK). Your significant other finds you in the fetal position stress-eating pepperoni and muttering something unintelligible.