Because few companies can own their entire infrastructure? I'd rather restart my server in a different AZ and have Amazon deal with tracking down an intermittent networking issue than to pay a senior network administrator to open a ticket with Cisco and try to replicate it on our lab.
Likewise, I really don't want to pay a power engineer to troubleshoot why our automatic transfer switch failed to transfer after a power failure and it took down our entire datacenter, I'd rather let Amazon deal with that while I failover to my backup servers in another AZ or region.
And my 100mbit ethernet handoff with a DS3 backup doesn't give me much clout with the teleco when the network is down, but AWS's multiple OC-192's (?) gives them a lot more leverage and more redundancy.
Owning your own infrastructure doens't mean that you don't have to deal with a third party provider, but it does ensure that you're caught in the middle of it more often.
Nobody said it eliminates problems, but moving to the cloud doesnt either, it just hides them away. If that's what you want, that's OK, but at the same time, don't expect much sympathy when you make a blog-post like this and bitch about the lack of transparency on a system you don't manage. You may want to give up control of your infrastructure to someone else, but my personal (not statistical, mind you) experience is that you end up with less control, for more cost.
I have my primary services spread across 3 separate datacenters (AZ's), and backup services across 3 separate AZ's in a region on the opposite side of the country. I pay far less than I would if I put my equipment in only 3 datacenters (2 primary + one secondary) since most of my backup infrastructure is powered off.
And I have far more control than I had with colocated equipment, if I find I need to scale up my services by 2X, 5X or 10X, all it takes is a little more money during the time I need the extra hardware (i.e. end of month processing, plus holiday shopping season), I don't need to order hardware a month or two in advance and pay for it all even when I don't need it.
What I used to pay for my network infrastructure alone (hardware + support + network engineers) pays for most of my entire AWS compute infrastructure.
Likewise, I really don't want to pay a power engineer to troubleshoot why our automatic transfer switch failed to transfer after a power failure and it took down our entire datacenter, I'd rather let Amazon deal with that while I failover to my backup servers in another AZ or region.
And my 100mbit ethernet handoff with a DS3 backup doesn't give me much clout with the teleco when the network is down, but AWS's multiple OC-192's (?) gives them a lot more leverage and more redundancy.
Owning your own infrastructure doens't mean that you don't have to deal with a third party provider, but it does ensure that you're caught in the middle of it more often.