[athrun]

I don't see how a single "skilled ops person" can deliver "lower service fees, more flexibility, improved productivity". On the other hand, Cloud Computing will, by definition, let you turn on and off services based on business demands. It doesn't get much more flexible and cost effective than that.

"You just need to be better off, long term." - This is a good one. Do you really think your homegrown Docker environment, Hadoop cluster and/or state-of-the-art Cassandra ring maintained by your one and only skilled Unicorn is a better long term plan than 100% managed alternatives? Let's see how well (and how secure) your in-house stuff work 2-3 years down the road and how it will then compare with the always "up-to-date" alternative.

The "vendor lock-in" part is your only valid argument, in my opinion. Costs/benefits will have be weighted properly. How much do you value business agility and pace of innovation vs. increased vendor dependency?

The proper answer will be different for all businesses, but I would argue that as long as a specific IT component/technology is not part of your core business, you might be better off buying it off-the-shelves instead of building it and maintaining it yourself.

[stephenr]

Set it up well, and train dev staff to understand what monitoring notifications mean. I mean, you are monitoring your services hosted on AWS right?