[mikekchar]

It reduces the complexity of your ops environment. Not the OP, but we do the same thing (though not with GL). When you only have a couple of developers, it makes sense to keep everything in house because your cost is essentially a couple of hours keeping things up and running as well as having an extra development machine somewhere. When you are a large organisation it also makes sense because you have a whole bunch of ops people keeping things running. Somewhere in between there is an awkward point where you've got enough complexity that you'll need to hire an ops person to handle it, but you don't have the organisational infrastructure to deal with that hire. Outsourcing is actually less risky because you're essentially piggy backing on somebody else's large organisation. A single bad hire isn't going to sink you, for example.