You should talk to people who have done this IRL, not on HN. This is a difficult thing to pull off, and like any complex decision, there's a lot of trade-offs.

You should talk to people who have done this IRL, not on HN. This is a difficult thing to pull off, and like any complex decision, there's a lot of trade-offs. Without knowing your specific situation, it's fair to say that volume helps out Netflix a lot, and you won't get anything close to the unit costs they have. The major thing that sways people to one side or the other is the kind of problems they want to build an organization to cope with. Do you want to build an engineering team that can handle a whole availability zone in Amazon going out, or do you want to hire one that eeks performance out of bare metal? Do you want a sales organization that has to go to the mat over security details, or a marketing organization that has to cope with justifying why "you're not a cloud company, you don't use the cloud" in their brand? There's going to be bumps either way. Source: I used to sell monitoring software, so I got to talk to a lot of people making this decision. We tended to find big opps when people made the move.