One can always do a hybrid approach, where baseline load is handled on purchased machines, but with renting AWS time on an as-needed basis. Also, ops staff is u

One can always do a hybrid approach, where baseline load is handled on purchased machines, but with renting AWS time on an as-needed basis. Also, ops staff is useful, and often has skillsets that augment development. Letting someone else worry about building daemons, tuning parameters, etc, means that your devs can spend more time actually writing code. Interrupting your devs because nginx has a memory leak can be a much bigger waste of time.