>Basically you are lying to yourself if you think you can run a datacenter cheaper and better than Amazon or Microsoft
what magical things do they have? that every single reasonably sized enterprise doesn't have? it should be extremly easy for a small enterprise to beat any of the main clouds* - they make crap ton of profit from you
*making an assumption that your needs are reasonably static and not MASSIVELY busting up and down your infrastructure
The "magical" thing they have is thousands and thousands of people thinking about how to improve the performance/efficiency/availability of their datacenters.
And yes, they pay the costs of those people and take a good profit margin, and yes there are in some ways diminishing returns to go from 3 nines to 6. But most enterprises can't match that depth of concentrated expertise, certainly not most small enterprises.
just to confirm I when i say small(ish) enterprise - i'm referring to company with around 500+ people and a IT dept of over 20+ people
seriously??!? you think you need thousands of people to to improve your effeciency and performance I would strongly suggest employing a few good infrastructure engineers/ architects who know what they're talking about - there really is no secret sauce!! just lots of kool aid on cloud
the whole cloud thing only looks wonderful and magical if your inexperienced.
re: the whole up time x9 thing is fairly useless in the real world, since the architecture of the application is really the king here!! christ on a stick i got an application running 100% for 3+ years on NT 4 because of good design (the clue is active - active - active)
also to add... availibilty zones are a very very poor mans DR
what magical things do they have? that every single reasonably sized enterprise doesn't have? it should be extremly easy for a small enterprise to beat any of the main clouds* - they make crap ton of profit from you
*making an assumption that your needs are reasonably static and not MASSIVELY busting up and down your infrastructure