Not parent but I'd guess they are talking about OpenStack but if they are they are wrong. Running a data center is no easy or cheap task. Sure you might have SOME of the logistics cut out for you using OpenStack but the barriers to entry are still VERY high.
Openstack + spare capacity in a colo facility + a bunch of few years old servers offloaded in a facilities auction and you can build one pretty quickly.
Tech isn't the hard part - barriers to get a service up and running are dropping drastically.
Hard part is marketing & scaling, and as AWS expands services there are risks from pure-play vendors that do just one slice of the stack 2-3x better than Amazon does.
It isn't as easy as you make it sounds, just a few thoughts:
1. OpenStack still has plenty of bugs and issues you are going to hit.
2. You'll still need a really good colo facility.
3. High bandwidth and Multiple internet providers are expensive. If you look at Amazon they have an excellent blend of bandwidth including direct connectivity to many eyeball providers (Comcast, Charter, RCN etc.) which usually makes your data get there quickly and prevents peering bottlenecks.
4. If you need more than one facility then you just get to double your costs.
5. People costs, you'll need people that can manage your infrastructure at scale.
6. Hardware capex can severely drain companies.
7. Vendor sprawl and support. (You still may need a CDN, DNS provider, etc.)
Doing your own thing can quickly become much more expensive than Amazon or other cloud providers.
The datacenters is also just part of it. All that software is itself part of the deal. That said, people could build competing services to some AWS products right on top of AWS' own services...
With superior software giving you higher utilization of the real server, you could theoretically turn a profit by reselling AWS capacity at prices cheaper than what AWS itself charges.
