Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of AWS
There&#x27;s two good reasons to use a service like AWS:<p>- You&#x27;re too small for efficient economies of scale on your own equipment (i.e. AWS is cheaper when considering total cost of ownership).<p>- You need to scale rapidly to meet demand<p>The second one is largely a data issue, if you have enough historical data on your customers, their habits, usage, and so on then scaling becomes predictable and even when it isn&#x27;t you could offload only part of your infrastructure to a cloud vendor.<p>What&#x27;s interesting is that several companies that I know which rely on AWS&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;et al aren&#x27;t on it for either of the two above stated &quot;good&quot; reasons.<p>They are large businesses and do almost no automated scaling. They&#x27;re on it for what can only be described as internal political limitations, meaning that they are on these services to remove the politics of technology infrastructure, one less manager at the top, a shorter chain of communications, an external party to blame when something does go wrong, and issues like HR&#x2F;benefits&#x2F;etc for infrastructure employees is outside the scope.<p>In effect they view themselves as &quot;not a technology company&quot; so look to employ the fewest technology employees as they can. Even in cases where technology is paramount to their success. It is very interesting to watch, and I&#x27;m not even claiming they&#x27;re &quot;wrong&quot; to handle their infrastructure this way, just that it is hard to quantify the exact reasoning for it.