[gtsteve]

There are other benefits also:

1. You can get started for dirt-cheap or in some cases, free

2. There's a common API for requesting new instances and performing maintenance tasks

3. There are extra services available to help build your apps such as SES, S3, and RDS to name but a few I found very helpful.

I'm not saying anything in this thread is wrong. But in software engineering, we say "write the code that only you can write", which is a suggestion (but not a rule) to use pre-built libraries instead of trying to make your own. Perhaps we should also say, "run the instances that only you can run".

[hueving]

>2. There's a common API for requesting new instances and performing maintenance tasks

Only true if you commit to vendor lock-in. If you use a higher-level cloud agnostic library, then it likely works with openstack as well so you can manage on-prem and off-prem instances the same.

[TheHydroImpulse]

At a high enough scale, you have a lock-in _somewhere_. Spending time trying to abstract yourself from any lock-in can be wasteful.