<i>Do you really need two full time devops&#x2F;whatever to manage the open source equivalents to the AWS services?</i><p>No, you need many more than that.  AWS&#x27;s offerings are complex systems, each backed by multiple large teams of developers and operations people.  And that&#x27;s not just because they have tons of customers.<p>You want to run a partitioned, replicated data store with five nines of reliability?  Good luck doing even just that with two people.  Throw in metrics (CloudWatch), a queuing system (SQS), monitoring&#x2F;failover with on-demand provisioning (EC2 + auto scaling groups), and you&#x27;re talking a lot more than just two devops people... well, unless you want them both on-call 24&#x2F;7&#x2F;365, and you want them to burn out in a matter of weeks.<p>AWS isn&#x27;t perfect by any means, and you can certainly argue that it can be overpriced... but maybe you pick and choose, and use AWS for the things you don&#x27;t have expertise in or time for, and roll your own for the rest.  The nice thing is that AWS lets you offload all that stuff when you&#x27;re small and don&#x27;t want to or can&#x27;t retain that kind of expertise in-house, and then you can focus on actually building your awesome product that runs on AWS&#x27;s plumbing.  And when you have more time and people later, you can look into doing things differently to save money, piece by piece, when it makes sense to do so.