[jtrtoo]

Is any of this good/bad/right/wrong? I have no idea. That depends quite a bit on what THEY are doing with it and why. For example, it can be cheaper to distribute from CloudFront versus straight from S3 for some use cases. Though, generally, you are not only looking at using CloudFront to save money over S3 ...there's typically a performance reason.

And sometimes the hosting costs simply don't matter. It's easy for us engineers - siting here on HN - to sit at our keyboards and play around with hypothetical ways to save money. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there are numerous things in IT that it doesn't make sense to optimize. Why? Because the ROI on the engineering time, CapEx, and OpEx (and the time, energy, and focus of ANYONE involved or impacted at all) to do the optimization doesn't outweigh the opportunity cost.

Sometimes there are simply better uses of our limited capital and time.

Not everything needs to be optimized. And the argument gets stronger when there are other factors more difficult to factor in: adopting a platform that isn't as widely known or isn't backed by a similar level of maturity (even with it's quirks, at least they are well known), etc.

The risks/concerns not only vary between organizations, but often from one period of an organization's growth to the next. The beauty is every organization gets to make their own decision ...and none of them have to give a damn if the HN community agrees or not. :-)