The key is in what that scale is. Everyone thinks they're already at that scale, or soon will be. Most are not and won't for a very long time. I've worked for l

The key is in what that scale is. Everyone thinks they're already at that scale, or soon will be. Most are not and won't for a very long time. I've worked for large companies (> 500 engineers) where building your own custom thing might make sense. But I've also worked for companies with less than 60 engineers where about 10 of them where infrastructure engineers building all this craziness we're talking about. Put into the equation all these salaries and the opportunity cost and you have a pretty juicy budget for appengine or similar.