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.
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...