[Sebb767]

> And not realizing you really need 4-6 of these people to be able to get to your five nines is the second mistake (you need people on call 24x7 and when they are sick, over Christmas, etc).

If you need that kind of availability, you need to have people on call anyway to babysit your app. A good infrastructure (unless built to the minimal price point) will handle nearly all cases of hardware failure automatically, without someone having to wake up, so it's not likely to put additional load on those people.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point, but if you need five nines, you're talking about an entirely different league of infrastructure compared to people who need two or three VMs that could also be handled by a NUC somewhere in the office (which will amortize itself against AWS in a few months).