Yes, I guess the 150 machine is more like a guideline. It depends very much on your workload. If you need 150 beefy machine running at 90%CPU all the time, then

Yes, I guess the 150 machine is more like a guideline. It depends very much on your workload. If you need 150 beefy machine running at 90%CPU all the time, then yes, running your colo may come out ahead. On the other hand, if you run a system with an online fleet of say 20 web servers, a couple of beefy databases, and some offline analytic workload, then AWS will definitely come out ahead. And that is not considering other AWS offering. I've come to really like DynamoDB. It takes some time to get used to, but I've found it's solving more and more problems for me, without having to scale OPS engineers. There is a danger of lock-in, but I guess as I am a paying customer, it's not going away anytime soon, and Amazon is probably not jacking up the price either.