Very different experience with AWS/OpenStack/running our own here. We indeed had a largish AWS bill ~50k/month. Decided to move dev/test in house into an OpenStack cluster I built with the help of Mirantis/FuelWeb. Decent experience standing up the cluster but spurts of trouble thereafter. No real win with anything API-like at all with OpenStack. Feels half-baked. Getting help is damn near impossible.

Meanwhile in AWS-land, things are humming along. Using more and more of the AWS infrastructure and removing pieces we had previously built in-house. Getting lots of mileage out of boto/Java/awscli and starting to see a real paradigm shift in how to run ephemeral servers instead of the 700 instances 24x7 approach you refer to above.

I came from running my own servers, floundered for a bit on AWS, built an OpenStack cluster and strongly prefer AWS for simplicity and sheer flexibility of the API. I'm a year in running on AWS and haven't had a single issue requiring any support.

The largest benefit has come from the concepts and projects put out by Netflix. If I didn't see companies like them leading the way, I'd likely be a bigger OpenStack fanboy.

See generally: http://www.cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/openstack-a...