&gt; Most AWS services are implementations of open source solutions.<p>This is fundamentally not understanding what AWS is.<p>- You could say &quot;EC2 is just Xen&quot;. But next time there is a 0-day exploit, I&#x27;ll have AWS working all weekend to patch my servers. And Xen still doesn&#x27;t have an API for scaling physical hardware..<p>- You could say &quot;S3 is just Apache&quot;. But I will never see a &quot;disk full&quot; message, I will never get paged if something is borked (but it will still get fixed), I will never worry about DDOS attacks, etc.<p>&gt; Once you implement it yourself on Linux, the ongoing cost drops.<p>That&#x27;s like saying &quot;it&#x27;s cheaper if you change your own oil&quot;. Might be true, but doesn&#x27;t matter. I&#x27;m still taking my car in. Lots of other people do. You might try asking them why.