&quot;TL;DR I hear this argument all the time. The cloud isn&#x27;t perfect but its a hell of a lot closer to anything I could achieve. &quot;not invented here&quot; syndrome won&#x27;t save your data.&quot;<p>I think there is an easy rebuttal that should be considered...<p>First, the &quot;nines&quot; rating of any service or resiliency is just gibberish.  Go find the statistical likelihood of money market funds &quot;breaking the buck&quot; or of CDS blowing up - both in 2007&#x2F;2008.  Those had a lot of nines too and a lot of very smart , well qualified people attesting to those nines (in venues even more serious than IT).<p>A highly complex system becomes incomprehensible, even to the people that built it.  Those nines mean nothing.<p>Second, you absolutely <i>can</i> build something more stable and predictable than Amazon <i>precisely because you&#x27;re the one that built it</i> - which means that it is more comprehensible and fails more predictably and gracefully.<p>I don&#x27;t care who does the calculation and how many nines they come up with - if you load FreeBSD on two bare metal servers and put them in two different datacenters <i>and run them with any kind of conservative and cautious sysadminning</i> you&#x27;ll have a better solution.  Yes, it will be more expensive.[1][2]<p>The standard closure to a comment like this is to refer to Talebs Black Swan and Antifragile books ... which you certainly should read ... but even more important is &quot;Normal Accidents&quot; by Charles Perrow[3] which I hope will convince you to stop looking for complex things that never fail, and instead look for simple things that fail gracefully.<p>[1] ... but we have a HN-Readers discount - just ask!<p>[2] You know who we are.<p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Normal_Accidents" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Normal_Accidents</a>