>My point is what you are describing for a small business person requires a tech person knowledgeable with AWS to implement It may seem that way, but in actual

>My point is what you are describing for a small business person requires a tech person knowledgeable with AWS to implement It may seem that way, but in actuality, it really doesn't. In the case I described, their "tech" guy was someone who'd been pushed into the role by necessity. He had the most knowledge out of a body of people who didn't really make it their area of expertise, and became the IT guy as a result. He did a well enough job working on his own. But there's things he's going to miss, and it's a lot to keep up with if you want to run an infrastructure right. As you pointed out, it's a lot different running Software-as-a-service solution like Webmail vs. Infrastructure or Platform as a service. But that's the nice thing about AWS (and to be fair, Azure and Google do this quite well too) is that there's a solution for your tech level. If he were really knowledgeable and wanted to roll his own mail solution, he can, and stand up instances running sendmail and put in his own MX records into our DNS service and manage all of the bells and whistles. Or, he can use Workmail (or Gmail for business if you want to be agnostic) and point and click his way to getting mail set up. So there's a lot of range there, and the higher you go up the stack, the more management you hand off to the cloud provider at the (hopefully small) expense of control. But if the provider's offering fulfils all of your requirements, then it's a great deal for small, non-technical, shops who can offload their workloads into a provider who are experts at managing infrastructure, and you, the business owner, can create the occasional account and otherwise focus on business. There's a great chart on this you might have seen, but it looks something like this: http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/iaas-paas-saas.jpg http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c... In any case, there's a solution for everyone depending on their skillset, and arguably, (in my humble yet biased opinion =P ) AWS has the best spread. If I had one self-criticism about us, it's that it's not always intuitive as to which of our services fall in the SAAS/PAAS/IAAS stack. Education will always be a challenge no matter who the provider is, and being that cloud is still relatively young, it's up to AWS, Microsoft, Google, and everyone else to explain just what "cloud" means and how to start with it. As for locked in, it’s AWS’ goal to keep you by ensuring you /want/ to use the service, not because you’re forced to be here. There’s no lock in other than transit fees. Which, if you have thousands of terabytes, can be hefty. That’s bandwidth for you. But there’s nothing proprietary. Take your code and data with you. I’ve seen engineers walk customers through the process of getting their stuff out. It happens. Not often, but it does, and we’ll help with that too.