Having managed a small data center in the past and having seen what it takes to manage multiple enterprise-scale data centers, the answer is "no, AWS does it be

Having managed a small data center in the past and having seen what it takes to manage multiple enterprise-scale data centers, the answer is "no, AWS does it better." The company that I'm in right now has two engineers (including myself) who are building and maintaining a product that serves millions of streams a week. There's no fucking way we could have done this ourselves. One F5 would cost more than our entire total AWS bill for two years - and we'd have to have at least 4 F5s if we wanted to try to match AWS. Plus the media encoders would cost a fortune. For some things it's fine to head over to lowendbox.com and pick up a cheap VPS hosting package. We could theoretically build our stack on top of a bunch of VPSs, sync everything with rsync, etc. But then we'd be spending time building infrastructure (which is pretty much valueless) instead of our product.