> If they saved $800k per year, and they have to hire four additional ops engineers to run it at a cost of $400k per year, I guess you've never done it yoursel

> If they saved $800k per year, and they have to hire four additional ops engineers to run it at a cost of $400k per year, I guess you've never done it yourself? I'm not sure what those 4 engineers would be doing. You purchase a few servers with 5 year on site warranty and remote management, you take a couple of days to install them in some racks, and you never visit the site for 5 years. If they break, the manufacturer sends someone to fix them on site. The rest of the time you administer them remotely - just like you would AWS. If you want VM's install proxmox. Whether it's cheaper than renting bare metal in a data centre is an debatable - colo costs a small fortune where I live. But they aren't comparing it to that. They are comparing it to locking themselves into a closed source system that need specialised expertise to run, versus administering an open source Linux system that even the people running EC2 should be very familiar with. Most of the stuff AWS provides has open source counterparts - hell a whole pile of it is just open source they wrap a proprietary API around and charge you for. 10 times sounds like a lot, I'm guessing it's really less. Even so I come form the camp that shakes his head in disbelief at what people will pay AWS for basic VM and storage services, dressed up in a fancy API and marketing.