Other way around, you'd be surprised at how much infrastructure you can buy by forgoing AWS's offerings (for large work scales.)
For small companies, you may not be able to afford infrastructure people, and moving fast makes way more sense. There's little point in paying for an ops person when you have very little infrastructure.
At a certain scale though, AWS stops being cost effective. You begin to have room in your budget for ops people, you get room to afford datacenter costs, and you can start paying for a cloud architect to fill out internal or hybrid cloud offerings using openshift or openstack.
>Yeah, Netflix's opinion is to use Amazon as little as possible.
This is simply untrue. Everything but their CDN uses AWS.
>Their critical infrastructure (the CDN) is not anywhere near the slimy grip of AWS.
The streaming website and app aren't critical infrastructure? Databases containing all of their business and customer details aren't critical infrastructure? Encoding content so it can be delivered by the CDN isn't critical infrastructure?
That's like saying I don't trust Ford because I buy Michelin tires while I drive a Fusion.
The CDN is in the ISPs data center. You can’t get much lower latency than that. But if Netflix is AWS’s largest customer, I doubt they are using it as little as possible.
Netflix does presentations every year at ReInvent about how they use AWS and they have a ton of open source tooling they wrote specifically tied to AWS.
