> So their AWS bill is $500k/year. > Hire one person to buy, configure, manage hardware is what? $250k/year? And is this self-hosting more reliable than AWS?

> So their AWS bill is $500k/year. > Hire one person to buy, configure, manage hardware is what? $250k/year? And is this self-hosting more reliable than AWS? A company which has a total AWS bill of $500k/yr is a very small one (the article says 500K is just the RDS/ES bill, so total is surely much higher for them). Our (tiny startup) AWS bill is ~200K/yr and the amount of compute and storage we do could very easily be handled by one single physical server. Now, sure, if we went to self-hosted we'd split that into multiple servers for redundancy and growth headroom, but in any case definitely less than a dozen boxes. You don't hire anyone to install and manage the hardware at that scale. Someone from the ops team goes to the colo for a day or two to set it all up and then you only need to go back when something needs replacement, which at that small scale is going to be very rarely. That's exactly what we did at a previous startup and the company grew to many, many hundreds of people before there was so much infrastructure that it became worth thinking about hiring a dedicated person. By that time you'd be in the 10s of millions in AWS spend.