Another perspective; location and staffing. Last first: Getting enough competent people to whatever you have. Just getting people that knows the difference bet

Another perspective; location and staffing. Last first: Getting enough competent people to whatever you have. Just getting people that knows the difference between rm -rf / and rm -rf ./, not to plug both ends of a cable into the same switch/router, ... can be quite hard. If you have a premium product running on a few hundred machines, AWS doesn't actually eat that much margin compared to having your own 24/7 staff & all that entails. And when the company then decides to open up "somewhere over in that big asian market", you've got to do it all over again. You can get a lot done with "remote hands" and whatnot, but again - something that eats your margin, just as AWS does...