I don't think think that is what he is saying, or at least, I would have made a similar post if I had gotten here first. ;) You've basically got two groups of

I don't think think that is what he is saying, or at least, I would have made a similar post if I had gotten here first. ;) You've basically got two groups of people: 1) Those who can capacity plan accurately and relatively stable capacity needs. For this group, Amazon is a complete and total rip off. There is a skill floor to this, admittedly, in the form of a sysadmin/devops fellow with years of experience. [Hint: A large fraction of the SaaS providers who use Amazon are likely in this group if they had someone who met the skill floor for this option. I'll admit it is a skill floor because they need to be able to deploy a 1 or 3 Datacenter HA configuration without someone holding their hand.] 2) Those who have highly variable loads [Netflix] and/or lack the necessary experienced DevOps/Sysadmin type who can do capacity planning.