Self hosting our company infrastructure would require hundreds of physical servers. That's the easy part. Put those servers into a room, where they can work, they have power, network etc. Yes, we could move to self hosting. Yes, the company is dead before the servers are shipped, if amazon goes down everywhere and not recover. If they lose a region we are fine.
And we are a medium company.
I don't understand why you would allow this situation to arise, though. What are you waiting for ordering those servers right now, while Amazon is still working?
If you require hundreds of physical servers, it's basically guaranteed that on the long term it would be cheaper to host them yourself than let Amazon do the job, with the risks that that entails.
It's fine to take this kind of risk while you're not sure if you're going to operate long term at all, but once that's established and if you're not a small shop, depending absolutely on one company is unforgivable.
The startup costs, ongoing maintenance, and organizational costs of mitigating this kind of risk have to be considered with an evaluation of the likelihood of the event occurring. And other things the company could do with those same resources.
Do you have a fully equipped backup home somewhere far away you keep stocked with consumables and perishables in case where you live is destroyed by a meteorite one day? If not, why not?
But my company does everything we can in order not to have a single point of failure, however unlikely it is to fail. Because low probabilities of something still mean it can happen, and you don't want to allow that if you can avoid it.
Yes. I have some friends and family members who live anywhere between 1 mile and 10,000 miles away, in both same country and other countries, that I can turn to provide me with food and shelter if my home is no longer available for some reason.
Regardless of them, I can take shelter short term in a hotel or other rental facility, as I have sufficient savings that I'll continue to be warm and fed.
The comparison doesn't hold up. A business cannot just reform overnight if critical dependencies disappear. A person can.
This is equivalent to knowing you could get a hotel room or crash with a friend, instead of maintaining a whole second home yourself.
I'm not sure why the hostility or what exactly you disagree with. I said that we could migrate off of AWS but it'd take more than a day. You say that your company can migrate off AWS but it would take more than a day. Where's the disagreement?
Sure, you could _migrate_ off of AWS if AWS was still alive. Could you restore your data and start your business from scratch if you lost everything? I suspect many rather large businesses could not.
Ask yourself why Enterprise isn't in the cloud yet. There are significant reasons.
What if there's an error and Amazon bans your account, do you just shut down and give up? There's no contingency plan whatsoever?