[imiric]

You and GP are making the same assumption that my DevOps engineers _aren't_ as experienced as AWS' are. There are plenty of engineers capable of maintaining an in-house infrastructure running X 9s because, again, the complexity comes from the scale AWS operates at. So we're both arguing with an a priori assumption that the grass is greener on our side.

To be fair, I'm not saying never use cloud providers. If your systems require the complexity cloud providers simplify, and you operate at a scale where it would be prohibitively expensive to maintain yourself, by all means go with a cloud provider. But it's clear that not many companies are prepared for this type of failure, and protecting against it is not trivial to accomplish. Not to mention the conceptual overhead and knowledge required with dealing with the provider's specific products, APIs, etc. Whereas maintaining these systems yourself is transferrable across any datacenter.