[ryanjkirk]

Nobody is arguing that a startup needs a datacenter; that is a ridiculous straw man. I'm well aware of the costs, having managed multiple colos as well as multiple cloud footprints. I also know you can lease most hardware, if you prefer not to depreciate assets.

You're casting this as a much more complicated concept than it is. It is essentially the same old "build vs buy" argument. No, it does not make sense to manage a datacenter to run a single wordpress blog, nor does it make sense for a telco to run their infra on top of a public cloud. These are all truisms.

My point stands that if you have a seven-figure AWS bill, you already have plenty of associated staffing costs. Once you hit the break-even point between the two, you can decide whether you want to continue to pay linearly, or go down the path of increasing RoI.