>It eliminates a single point of failure. When Netflix previously owned and managed their own datacenters, they had a massive 3-day database outage[1] that dis

>It eliminates a single point of failure. When Netflix previously owned and managed their own datacenters, they had a massive 3-day database outage[1] that disrupted shipping DVDs to customers. Even though they are a Silicon Valley tech company and built their own datacenter competency with internal staff engineers, it didn't prevent that major failure. Based on interviews with Reed Hastings and Adrian Cockcroft, they said the 2 big reasons they migrated to AWS was (1) the pain of that 3-day outage and (2) the future expansion plans into international regions. They didn't want to buy more datacenters and manage that extra complexity. Reed said, "they wanted to get out of the datacenter business". Yes, AWS/GCP/Azure all have outages too but Netflix (and other customers) conclude that -- as a whole -- those cloud vendors will be more reliable than in-house solutions. The cloud vendors also iterate on new features faster than in-house staff -- especially for non-tech companies like The Guardian newspaper.[2] Some big companies such as Facebook, Walmart, can employ an army of IT staff with the skills to maintain complex "private clouds". However, most non-tech companies found out that internal clouds were an inefficient way to spend money on IT because it wasn't their core competency. Just because a raw racked server installed on-premise is cheaper than EC2 doesn't mean the TCO (Total Cost Ownership) is cheaper. [1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-netflix-cloud-migration https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-net... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160319022029/https://www.computerworlduk.com/cloud-computing/guardian-goes-all-in-on-aws-public-cloud-after-openstack-disaster-3629790/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160319022029/https://www.compu...