> storage system management
I was a bit incredulous that any truly all-inclusive analysis could ever show AWS being cheaper, but this phrasing made me realize that it could have been the one (remarkably common) case where it usually does: enterprise hardware.
That world is easily more expensive than AWS, especially considering that hardware maintenance contracts are a thing (and a shockingly expensive one, to those of us accustomed to the commodity hardware world).
> Also, we liked the ability to have a failover region essentially for free - we only pay for enough servers to replicate the key data we need for failover, and keep the rest of the infrastructure powered off.
That's a useful advantage, though there's a pitfall in that there's no powering off EBS volumes.
Because we were already managing our own data center.
I think it would be better to compare AWS vs renting dedicated servers from a large provider? I think you will find that the scales tip heavily in favor of renting bare metal as far as price is concerned.
We offloaded a lot of work to Amazon that we were doing ourselves -- database hosting, storage system management, etc (lots of little used data went into S3/Glacier that previously we had on live disks)
Also, we liked the ability to have a failover region essentially for free - we only pay for enough servers to replicate the key data we need for failover, and keep the rest of the infrastructure powered off.