Because so much had been invested (sunk cost fallacy), no-one could really get their heads around a shift to SES, even though it would have been a slam dunk in improved reliability and developer productivity.
Whereas if we were on, say, Mailgun, and then someone wanted a shift to SES, that debate could probably have been a more rational one.
I just point this out to say that investing in your own infrastructure can be a very real form of lock-in itself.
For small companies, you may not be able to afford infrastructure people, and moving fast makes way more sense. There's little point in paying for an ops person when you have very little infrastructure.
At a certain scale though, AWS stops being cost effective. You begin to have room in your budget for ops people, you get room to afford datacenter costs, and you can start paying for a cloud architect to fill out internal or hybrid cloud offerings using openshift or openstack.
It's all about the right tool for the right job.
I know for a fact GE is moving a lot of their workload to AWS.
Yeah, Netflix's opinion is to use Amazon as little as possible. Their critical infrastructure (the CDN) is not anywhere near the slimy grip of AWS.
This is simply untrue. Everything but their CDN uses AWS.
>Their critical infrastructure (the CDN) is not anywhere near the slimy grip of AWS.
The streaming website and app aren't critical infrastructure? Databases containing all of their business and customer details aren't critical infrastructure? Encoding content so it can be delivered by the CDN isn't critical infrastructure?
That's like saying I don't trust Ford because I buy Michelin tires while I drive a Fusion.
Netflix does presentations every year at ReInvent about how they use AWS and they have a ton of open source tooling they wrote specifically tied to AWS.
This ease of use philospohy goes way back to the one-click patent. If I want DNS, why wouldn't I go to amazon, which has all my finance details, and a decent interface (and even API), rather than choosing another DNS provider, setting up my credit card, and having to maintain an account with them. So I choose DNS via AWS. Then I want a VPS, but why go to linode and have the overhead of another account when I could do lightsail instead?
If you use provider agnostic solutions, things get expensive quick.
Stuff like SNS and Cognito is much cheaper in terms of TCO.
If you don't use them you can switch providers more easily, but if you use them you wouldn't need to switch providers.
Also, this conversation is very different if you are an early stage company racing to market as opposed to an established organization where P&L often takes precedence over R&D.