If I knew how to setup OpenVZ and create < 10ms latency VPNs across multiple datacenters, then I would be a lot better at ops than I am. While I'm much better at ops now than I was when I co-founded awe.sm, I am still primarily a developer.
Our ops guy is much better than me, but his time is better spent working on higher-stack stuff like deployment automation, monitoring and efficiency tuning than on re-inventing a virtualization stack to save a few thousand dollars every month.
If we were bigger, it would be more worth the time and money spent. But without doing the math, we would have to be quite a lot bigger, I think.
I am not trying to be sarcastic, I am just tired of some of the AWS fanboi's (not you) who act as if AWS solves all of your problems immediately for $50 a month.
There are real costs no matter which way you go.
PS, would be very surprised if you had even 45ms latency between AWS-east in Virginia and any of their facilities on the west coast...
Much of the attraction that I see from people comes from the flexibility. Once you get to any significant size in an organization, it's not unusual for people to have to wait for _months_ to get servers rolled out.
The ability to whip out your credit card, and fire up new servers at AWS in minutes, becomes very attractive in that scenario.
I wasn't taking you as sarcastic, nor was I attempting snark in my reply: there are real costs either way, and it's our current judgement that learning how to do a virtualized, distributed stack would be more expensive than getting AWS to do it for us. (But, if I'm being honest, we haven't done any math)
And the < 10ms latency I'm talking about is between zones within us-east; latency to the west coast is a lot worse, but we only have emergency failover capacity in west.
Our ops guy is much better than me, but his time is better spent working on higher-stack stuff like deployment automation, monitoring and efficiency tuning than on re-inventing a virtualization stack to save a few thousand dollars every month.
If we were bigger, it would be more worth the time and money spent. But without doing the math, we would have to be quite a lot bigger, I think.