[CodeAndCuffs]

Part of the issue I see overlooked is the cost of acquiring and losing physical assets. If you have an onsite data center and a meteor hits it, how bad off are you?

Disclaimer, I barely passed my aws associates cert and have 0 qualifications to weigh in on this subject with any authority. It's just a point I've seen glossed over before. Yeah your data center is cheaper to run, but is it cheaper to replace?

[greatgib]

Any decent IT team will backup, replicate, shard, to different locations, and not rely on a single datacenter.

As said in the blog post, with the cloud you will get the same thing that you can pay your inhouse IT for 3 times the price.

For example, lots of people are thinking that by just using 'the cloud', your data is safe / replicated to multiple geographically separated areas. But no, it is not automatic, it needs to be configured like that with the associated costs. If you lose an ec2 instance, it will be lost in the same way as a node in your personal data center.

[lumost]

How likely is it that you have a competent IT team? If they are competent, are they also fast? I may not care about having a scalable, redundant deployment if it takes 3 years to get done.

It’s tough to recruit a tech team and keep it running. Worst case scenario the team leaves and your stuck with folks who don’t know how anything works.

[flashgordon]

+1. On top of this if you need to provide slos on availability, diaster recovery, respect regionalized requirements, even with a technical playbook just acquiring physical space gets hard and expensive real quick!

[Clubber]

That's a good point. Redundancy requires more cost and more expertise, but as a counter argument, AWS has had its share of outages lately as well.