> if you have someone with sysadmin/devops skills, it is easily doable.

And if you don't, AWS can be pretty cost-competitive because your developers can handle a lot of the "infrastructure" that you used to need a dedicated sysadmin (or a team of) to handle.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't likely spend my own money on them, but it does beat having to try to find an on-call infrastructure person and a reliable data centre with proper routes, and then developers/devops people who can scale, monitor, manage, and maintain queueing services, message gateways, object storage, databases, firewalls, load balancers, containers, VMs, network attached storage, etc.

Also, don't underestimate the value of things like CloudFormation. Being able to make an API call and have an entire cluster configured, with load balancing, backups, multi-AZ redundancy, CDNs, etc., is pretty potent.

AWS might be expensive, but it gives you access to a lot of things that you might not otherwise have, even if you do have a sysadmin/devops guy.