Every time I've moved people off AWS, there's been an immediate and substantial and ongoing drop in development and sysadmin costs as we have far more flexibility in setting up an environment that actually fits that customer and can make guarantees about the system that makes for a less complex system overall.

As for risk of beng "tied to me", that risk is far greater with AWS - the number of "moving wheels" is vastly greater. If I was thinking primarily of staying busy, I can easily charge far more for my AWS work than for the more "mundane" setups, so from tht point of view it'd be in my interest to stick everything on AWS. The market rate and availability for "regular" ops guys that can handle these setups is far better - at least here in London.

In terms of being tied to a particular vendors managed services: They're not. Getting out of lockin is part of the appeal of getting off AWS once they first make that decision (and to be clear, if they insist on deploying on AWS, I do that too - ultimately it needs to be their decision). The setups I do for clients typically only require a method for bootstrapping a server to a pre-agreed basic Linux setup (usually CoreOS these days) and bringing up ssh with a key. Everything beyond that is generally easy to make provider independent. We do this exactly so that they can mix and match, sometimes at the same time (e.g. I have one client that is currently running systems at AWS, Google and a managed provider at the same time, deployed off the same little setup).

The do get dependencies on certain performance characteristics etc., but typically they can easily be met at dozens of providers.

> However, my point is that if you solely base the cloud vs. managed decision on hosting costs, you are ignoring other real long-term costs and risks that are not as readily apparent, but can still have a significant impact in terms of upgrades, maintainability, downtime, availability, changes in personnel, etc.

I agree you have to consider these too, but generally they tilt the numbers further in favour of managed servers or co-located servers.

If we were comparing with "old style" manually deploying applications straight to bare metal, I'd agree. But the more realistic comparison is to deploy to containers or VMs running on a thin OS layer on bare metal or a hypervisor. The point is not to get rid of the cloud abstractions, but to get the flexibility of being able to pierce the clouds so to speak and make decisions about the lower layers to keep cost and complexity under control.

The main reason I see for AWS growth is that in my experience most of the tech guys pushing for it have no visibility to costs and budgets. Even lots of middle management don't. And upper management rarely understands the technology tradeoffs.

I've been in the bizarre situations in the past of having people ask me what I could possibly need salary statistics for my development team for, because it didn't cross anyones minds to actually take out cost data to determine how much money we were actually allocating to ops vs. request features vs. bug fixing, or to determine metrics for e.g. when it makes sense to simply buy more server capacity vs. spending developer time to optimize.

The biggest problem with this is that people look at "cloud" as "I get to delete this capex line" without understanding the new opex that comes with it, and without understanding how little of the ops time a well run team actually spends on the small bits of low level hardware stuff that is unique to managing your own hardware vs. renting vms.

Most people simply don't understand the cost of the technology choices they are making.

Being able to close the gap for people there is a very valuable service (and here's career advice to anyone making the leap into technology management: Be that guy that can actually price out the technology solutions your team proposes and that can digest and make the technology costs understandable for the business guys - it makes you surprisingly rare)

There are certainly people for whom AWS is the right choice. E.g. if you can make extensive use of spot pricing and bring up huge number of instances for short periods, then it can be hard to beat. But most people just don't have thos usage patterns.