[Periodic]

I've seen a few people hand wave around the costs of sys admins and claim that since they have a bunch of cloud-based systems they don't have to worry about it. Then a few days later they complain about getting the APIs to work and their custom software they had to write to store things to S3 instead of local disk.

It's a hard trade off to make and I would suggest the following: Go where your strengths are and outsource where they aren't. You can generally save money by doing something yourself, all other things being equal, but you'll generally lose money if you don't know what you're doing and could have hired a professional.