Fair question. Before moving to AWS we were running our own infrastructure on Rackspace and a lot of it was dedicated hardware, not cloud. That was expensive. F

Fair question. Before moving to AWS we were running our own infrastructure on Rackspace and a lot of it was dedicated hardware, not cloud. That was expensive. Fanatical support by RS also dropped dramatically in quality, taking days to resolve issues. AWS has a lot of redundancy baked in. The notion of "replace, don't fix" also made our codebase more resilient to failure. This is also true for most cloud suppliers. With AWS we don't need a PostgreSQL admin, it's managed. Redis is managed. Storage is cheap and can be replicated across the globe. So far we've reaped all the benefits without a devops person in-house.