[moltar]

Yes, but this is truly an exceptional case. Their workloads are basically scraping (crawling) at a massive scale. Just like Google does, it makes more sense to have cheap throw-away hardware for this use case.

There are no permission issues or ACLs.

There’s no need to auto scale and the traffic is very predictable.

There is no serious need to orchestrate deployments. I imagine it’s mostly just workers reading URLs from a queue and crawling a page. So very easy to deploy new servers.

This is just an edge case scenario specifically great for self hosting.

[m1keil]

Hardly an exceptional case. A lot of web shops use auto scaling as means to save money, not to respond traffic spikes like black friday's.

What is easier, having a bunch of powerful servers that provides you enough headroom or having to fight your auto-scaling group to have just enough capacity and in the end of the day still costing more?

[iforgotpassword]

It's not that much of an edge case. Sure, their load is super steady, but most other workloads are predictable enough, or rather it is still cheaper to over provision to your typical peak load and then some than doing the same entirely in the cloud. You might still get slashdotted if you have some overnight success, and whether this is acceptable in your business model then depends. You might've taken the hybrid approach where you can spin up additional resources in some cloud.