[mmt]

> storage system management

I was a bit incredulous that any truly all-inclusive analysis could ever show AWS being cheaper, but this phrasing made me realize that it could have been the one (remarkably common) case where it usually does: enterprise hardware.

That world is easily more expensive than AWS, especially considering that hardware maintenance contracts are a thing (and a shockingly expensive one, to those of us accustomed to the commodity hardware world).

> Also, we liked the ability to have a failover region essentially for free - we only pay for enough servers to replicate the key data we need for failover, and keep the rest of the infrastructure powered off.

That's a useful advantage, though there's a pitfall in that there's no powering off EBS volumes.