[windowsworkstoo]

This argument always comes out when someone points out how much bare metal stomps AWS. Here are some counterpoints

a) A large portion of AWS hosted stuff probably doesnt need that level of sudden, burst scaling

b) With something like SoftLayer/IBM you can scale physical servers, usually within 30 - 60 minutes

c) If your burst scaling requirement are temporary, if you are located in a decent DC, you can probably spin up some infra in AWS and access your physical stuff over a private network connection and get the best of both worlds.

As always, use what's best for your environment.

[TheHydroImpulse]

a) I don't really have a good enough sample size but I'd imagine a lot don't.

The biggest selling point of AWS is everything around it. You don't just get EC2, you get Route53, ELB, VPC, RDS, S3, CloudFront (although it's kinda expensive), ECS, etc... If I can pay AWS to do something instead of building it, I'll do it.