I've done that too. It's obviously easier than running an entire datacenter, but you still need to manage all the underlying services that you deliver to your d

I've done that too. It's obviously easier than running an entire datacenter, but you still need to manage all the underlying services that you deliver to your development team. For example, running things like this on your own: - storage clusters - database clusters - compute clusters They are often very easy to setup, but when things go wrong, they go very wrong. And welcome to a stressful environment because if you can't figure it out and your people can't, well, your business just sits and burns while you do. Even when AWS has a system-wide outage, it's nice to know that I don't have to be dealing with those underlying problems anymore and I know they have the best people working on them. I cannot put into words, after operating MySQL clusters on my own and playing back transactions after failures, how nice it is to use AWS RDS and how it's just been zero problems. Zero. I sleep through automatic updates of our database system with RDS. I would have never done that on our own system. And in most places, even "managed" leased hardware, you still will need to purchase/lease and run your own hardware firewalls and ddos mitigation. The datacenter might offer that protection "built-in" but you'll soon find the limitations of that offering when you face a substantial attack.