Pretty much. Its not so much the availability of physical servers (although that might be an issue) it was the features, and the time it took to port new bits

Pretty much. Its not so much the availability of physical servers (although that might be an issue) it was the features, and the time it took to port new bits and bobs. A classic example is databases. We had a puppet script that provided a HA-mysql cluster. However, it was very fragile, never really worked and I'm mostly sure the backups never actually took place. It would take me (a devop who was tasked with doing this sort of thing) the best part of 3 days to setup and verify. The whole thing collapsed when the DBA that made it left. RDS is a one click operation. yes its more expensive to run long term, but the saving on staff time was enormous. I will never go back to inhouse rolled puppet, unless it was proven to be outstanding.