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Comment by daigoba66 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder where the tipping is at which it's more economical to own/lease your infrastructure instead of AWS/Azure/etc.?

The company is certainly large enough to have their own infrastructure team.

But granted, migrating an entire system that makes extensive use of the AWS ecosystem is anything but trivial.

In terms of scale, for EC2 and all services that run on it, it's more economical at ALL points to rent (dedicated) or buy (colocate). S3 is more competitive, so that question becomes more interesting.

There might be specific use-cases/apps/business with high burstiness where the general case isn't true. There might also be teams that can't manage it.

The AWS services are a pretty good moat. Building and running your own S3 and EBS is not quick, cheap or easy.

I don't believe the "at ALL points" is true. What if I'm running a small system myself? My time is worth something to me and I'd rather not have to think about setting up my own backups and monitoring. On AWS I can do this with a few clicks. I can manage it, but I'd rather not.

Careful about ALL. What about something that fits in the free tier? OR $1 a month Lambda tier?

That's a minor exception not worth adding a footnote for.

So it's cool to just blindly say ALL when you mean "Many" ?

I could cop-out and say "but if it costs you 10x more after the free-tier is expired, is it really free?"

But I can admit that I forgot abut the free-tier. It's a good deal and a smart business move by amazon. Sorry.

High sustained use with little variance in resource demand (easy for HPC, storage-centric services). No need for geo-distribution (orbackblaze) big enough you'd need multiple data centers anyway (dropbox). For specialized uses, big enough to design and manufacture specialized cases up through motherboards (dropbox, backblaze).

The grass always greener, I know many companies moving their infrastructure to the cloud.

My calculations showed that as few as 10 instances was enough to make self-hosting cheaper and easier.

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