Most of the reasons to go with AWS as a major strategic decision are to avoid paying for 3-4 (or perhaps... 40+) ops engineers to run and manage so many things that really don&#x27;t add much business value in themselves and that you could hold to some form of an SLA (especially with enterprise support accounts) and recoup some costs if things came down to it. Furthermore, engineering a lot of AWS services would cost you developer time as well.<p>I consult &#x2F; contract for a Fortune 50 customer that pays an insane amount of money to AWS per month and it seems ridiculous what they&#x27;re paying for and what they get. But do you know what&#x27;s even more ridiculous? Paying <i>three times as much</i> but getting even worse reliability and a massive amount of time wasted while waiting weeks to provision servers. One group internally used to have massive outages <i>daily</i> resulting in needing to hire a dedicated team of about 6 just to handle that load of production incidents (terrible reliability also resulting in loss of revenue too) and since migrating their software with even the most bone-headed SPF-everywhere AWS based software architecture haven&#x27;t had more than one or two per week for outages now. The cost benefits get better the more incompetent &#x2F; incapable your internal IT organization is. The amount of wasted resources due to internal bureaucracy, legacy, and working with companies that don&#x27;t really practice any form of technology at scale has been an incredible amount of savings for my customer.<p>And knowing how much my customer relies upon AWS support for the most menial of tasks (primarily a cultural thing with how they treat their vendors as well as internal resources) I am sure that nobody but massive companies that deal with external bureaucracies effectively could deliver the size and kind of support team to handle the volume of support requests generated by my customer for the most ridiculous of tasks (I&#x27;ve seen executives file AWS support requests to reboot VMs at 3 am because the bureaucracy is extremely brittle here and reflects into the software systems reliability). We may throw millions &#x2F; month at AWS, but Amazon has to hire at least a few dozen engineers and several account managers just to handle support alone which I might argue could be a net loss to handle the customer.<p>Most vendors that work with my customer have a very hard time working with them because they approach sourcing quite similar to how Walmart does and abuses them to the point where the vendors abuse their employees.