I recognize that the costs become less straightforward the larger you get, and that a number of larger companies have to develop their own bare metal infrastruc

I recognize that the costs become less straightforward the larger you get, and that a number of larger companies have to develop their own bare metal infrastructure. But I was including companies exactly like Foursquare in that handful of tech companies. I'd still like to see an actual cost breakdown, because to me hiring a full-time staff of 5 or 10 people to run such an infrastructure, at $80,000/year or more a pop, seems like it could quickly get just as expensive or more expensive than outsourcing those costs to another organization. There has to be some reason Netflix is able to justify placing their entire high bandwidth streaming operation on AWS, a third party that relies on full virtualization.