Thanks RhodesianHunter.
> 1. AWS saves us money despite the apparent higher costs because our developers spend more time working on our core business than managing infrastructure, and developer time is our most expensive resource.
But in most cases you lose any preserved savings because of the very ease of use and lack of needing to think about the infrastructure management. This is because more often than not problems are solved by just adding another instance, vs actually solving the larger problem.
Also, I would say part of the core business is providing the server, not simply writing the software that is the interface to the service being provided to the end users. E.G. Keeping servers up and and the right number of them in operating is just as important to the core of the business as writing the software / website of the service you are intending on providing. Outsourcing that a 3rd party removes your ability for you to control the entire service that you intend on providing, it is left in the hands of somebody else who may not be aligned to your business needs.
> 2. Softlayer completely f'ed us twice now with down time resulting in a substantial dollar loss.
AWS has f'ed near half the internet before, and probably will do so again.
Service outages are shitty, I get it, but my suggestion for Softlayer was just that, there are others, and my favorite is actually colo with everybody else's cheap EOL servers.
As a anatotal I have seen far to many projects move from bare metal, to AWS or the likes who at a minimum tripple the running cost for less performance. You could say the engineers suck, but I thought they were going to get to spend more time working on core business?
I have ran the numbers many time myself and I can't support AWS for anything other than bootstrapping a well funded startup. After that if you want to lower your cost you are either going to have to jump through hoops and formulate your service to use the cheapest parts all while not focusing on the busness but trying to get that AWS bill down.