Can you scale up and scale down seamlessly? Can you turn off unused instances? Can you automatically and seamlessly move to the latest hardware running on-prem?
Do you want to focus some significant percentage of your time on managing infrastructure or do you want to focus on making what you sell to customers better?
I know it sounds like marketing and I know there's a point at which the cost of cloud doesn't make sense, but I do believe that that inflection point is pretty low if you're in a field that is moving quickly or are say a new startup and need to get to market with a minimum-viable-product to get an idea off the ground -- what a shame it would be to fumble that opportunity re-inventing the wheel with infrastructure.
Can you automatically and seamlessly move to the latest hardware running on-prem?
Yes
Do you want to focus some significant percentage of your time on managing infrastructure...
We spend about 10 minutes per day looking after the stack, with about 4 to 6 hours every 6 weeks looking at if and where we can improve things. We then spend about a week or so in depth once every year roughly evaluating different providers, and we typically end up moving to a different provider, which takes a few days.
...or do you want to focus on making what you sell to customers better?
This (infrastructure) is a big part of what we sell to our customers. What we do (and have been doing for about 15 years) is what you kids appear to be calling "devops" now. I was an early adopter (and discarder) of CFEngine...
I think I might have misunderstood your critique of my earlier points: are you on a public cloud or a private-distributed set of datacenters that your team has built up over the last 15-years? if the latter, how does that differ from a public cloud other than on price? And wouldn't a new firm (not yours with 15-years of investment) be better off on AWS or Azure or GCE and get all the benefit (albeit at higher cost) of your investment? A new firm doesn't have 15-years to spend on infrastructure.
Secondly, none of my points were specifically about AWS but they were about cloud in general.
Do you want to focus some significant percentage of your time on managing infrastructure or do you want to focus on making what you sell to customers better?
I know it sounds like marketing and I know there's a point at which the cost of cloud doesn't make sense, but I do believe that that inflection point is pretty low if you're in a field that is moving quickly or are say a new startup and need to get to market with a minimum-viable-product to get an idea off the ground -- what a shame it would be to fumble that opportunity re-inventing the wheel with infrastructure.