[deeviant]

I worked for a large scada company. We collected large amounts of data from thousands of large industrial installations.

One day we got a new VP who came from a well known firm who was a "cloud expert". He moved (nearly) all of our infrastructure to AWS, after producing untold amounts of spreadsheets/power points expressing how much cheaper/better/faster it's going to be.

Long story short, it was 4x more expensive as running it in house. By the time they went back to our own infrastructure, most of the internal sysops(including "The Glue" guy) had moved on and much of the old internal hardware was re-purposed or gone. It was a fiasco that they still have no fully recovered from yet.

I would be very careful in characterizing AWS as the solution for every large scale computer infrastructure problem.

Conversely, I have had excellent experiences with AWS in my current job, although we still have a rather large HPC cluster internally which would never make sense to move to AWS.