I don’t know if it costs far more but AWS is one big bill whereas running your own systems is a bunch of smaller expenses including real estate and employees in addition to hardware and utilities costs, insurance, etc which are harder to count. We see AWS on one big bill so the sticker shock is more palpable.

Moving to AWS didn’t just replace our services, it gave us a higher level of service reliability and availability. We would have had to double our spend to serve the globe as we really need to. AWS was the better option.

I think it costs a ridiculous amount because we moved over services that were built on self-run data centers where chron jobs were not billed on CPU cycles in a transparent way. Now they are. We can probably cut the AWS bill by as much as half through intelligent refactoring and optimization. Smarter data retention periods, killing off shit that isn’t worth it etc.