Comment by jdblair

When I joined a particular startup 4 years ago I was surprised that they owned their own servers mounted in racks in a rented colo. I was all, how retro! But then the head of IT showed me the cost savings over AWS and how he orchestrated it all using VMWare images, and I saw he had a point. He saved more than enough money to pay for his full time salary to keep it all going, even dealing with hardware maintenance. What was unique was that the company had a predictable load that didn't change much. If we had needed to change capacity level drastically over a regular cycle then AWS would have started to make sense.