This is like the third or fourth article I have read about some company leaving AWS and saving what seems like a ton of money. The thing they have in common is that they don’t talk about security and other more mundane things such as infrastructure maintenance, which is one of many things you pay AWS to not worry about.
Agreed.
With that $230k/year you’d have to hire more engineers to maintain the servers in addition to the normal day to day stuff they would be doing more quickly in AWS.
You’d also have to simply find engineers who are willing to work on that platform. I personally would not. If someone else out there is willing to figure out the details on pxe booting or the ipmi differences across vendors or hacking snmp data from a switch into a modern monitoring stack, good luck to them. Those days are behind me though. I’m never going back.
You don’t get that much “security”, though. You’re still responsible for actually securing all your applications and infrastructure components.
Also, this is a question of scale, just like with any make or buy decision. AWS isn’t magic, it’s just servers. For a small company, it makes sense to buy servers as a service, but at a certain scale, it stops making sense. This is no different from buying screws versus making your own screws.
