[Spivak]

Having worked at companies that colo'd and ran on AWS I think the difference isn't as big as you're making it seem. Many of services you "need" in the cloud are only needed because you're in a cloud in the first place.

The good news about colo'd equipment is that it's dirt cheap. You can have millions of customers running on a few poweredge nodes with full redundancy and capacity to spare.

[theevilsharpie]

> You can have millions of customers running on a few poweredge nodes with full redundancy and capacity to spare.

As someone that actually manages "a few PowerEdge nodes," you're overstating their capability and oversimplifying what it takes to run a production-grade system with millions of users.

[Spivak]

I mean my current company got our first million users with four used poweredge nodes and two database servers. Since we were using bargain basement equipment we were extremely paranoid about hardware failure and so every little aspect of our app was built to handle 2 whole nodes failing simultaneously and every service running on those boxes in VMs was two-failure redundant as well.

I mean ops isn't simple no matter where you're hosting it but it's not any harder than when I worked at AWS shops.