[otterley]

We're paying an agility premium, that's why. My company has both colocated and AWS assets, and while we save a bunch of money with the colocated assets over their AWS equivalents, we would much rather work with the AWS assets.

We don't have to bother ourselves with managing SANs, managing bare metal, managing hardware component failures and FRUs, managing PDUs, managing DHCP and PXE boot, managing load balancers, managing networks and VLANs, and managing hypervisors and VMs. We don't have to set up NFS or object stores.

Being on a mature managed service platform like AWS means that if we want 10 or 100 VMs, I can ask for them and get them in minutes. If I want to switch to beefier hardware, I can do so in minutes. If I want a new subnet in a different region, I can have one in minutes. There's simply no way I can have that kind of agility running my own datacenters.

Nobody disputes that AWS is expensive. But we're not paying for hardware or bandwidth qua hardware or bandwidth - we're paying for value added.

[developer2]

Curious, would you say this an indication that there are not enough talented/competent sysadmin/infrastructure people to employ to manage those tasks in-house? Or is it your opinion that AWS provides so much value that in-house simply can't compete in terms of the man-hours it would require to manage the equivalent? The whole "spin up in minutes" is certainly not unique to AWS; most hosting providers, especially if you are a sizeable business, is going to be at your beck and call whenever you need them.

I still think the benefits of AWS are over-emphasized within most businesses. Of the 4 companies I've worked for that used AWS, 3 of them did absolutely nothing different than you'd do anywhere else. One-time setup of a static number of servers, with none of the scaling/redundancy/failure scenarios accounted for. The 4th company tried to make use of AWS's unique possibilities, but honestly we had more downtime due to poorly arranged "magical automation" than I've ever seen with in-house. I suppose it requires a combination of the AWS stack's offerings and knowledgeable sysadmins who have experience with its unique complexities.

Disclaimer: I'm a developer rather than a sysadmin, not trying to justify my own existence. :p