I think you're not understanding that you DONT have to eventually manage all of the systems on your own. S3 requires effectively 0 management. Dynamo requires

I think you're not understanding that you DONT have to eventually manage all of the systems on your own. S3 requires effectively 0 management. Dynamo requires effectively 0 management. The list goes on, and grows every quarter. Sure, if you're just running EC2 nodes, there's some sysop requirement there. But if you run those on ElasticBeanstalk instead, you don't even have to manage that! It's very hard for server and hardware-focused folks to 'get' the dramatic difference of running with AWS or GCE or other large cloud ecosystems. It's trivial for a, say, Java developer, to have a large, scalable system and have 0 access to each try to manage the actual machines and software that everything is running on. You CANNOT replicate that in a private environment today, for anything less than a large infrastructure management cost.