My firm belief after building a service at scale (tens of millions of end users, > 100K tps) is that AWS is unbeatable. We don’t even think about building our own infrastructure. There’s no way we could ever make it reliable enough, secure enough, and future-proof enough to ever pay back the cost difference.

Something people neglect to mention when they tout their home grown cloud is that AWS spends significant cycles constantly eliminating technical debt that would absolutely destroy most companies - even ones with billion dollar services of their own. The things you rely on are constantly evolving and changing. It’s hard enough to keep up at the high level of a SaaS built on top of someone else’s bulletproof cloud. But imagine also having to keep up with the low level stuff like networking and storage tech?

No thanks.