As someone else stated, AWS doesn't provide you systems administrators. Storage administrators sure, but that's not difficult to absorb.
So taking that out of the equation, you're left with hardware and bandwidth. I imagine Netflix didn't get the same off-the-shelf price you or I would, so speculating on what their TCO is and how it would compare to a local build-out is probably fruitless.
For a small business, you can keep your hard costs (hardware/cabinets/power/bandwidth) under $10K/month and get a terabyte of memory in a pair of Dell R910s, a triply redundant 44TB SAN, a couple beefy Dell R610s with 96GB of RAM for database servers, Flash for the table-spaces and SAN read/write caches.
You can't come close to that kinda of power at AWS pricing.
Sure there may be cases where AWS makes sense at scale, but there are many more where it simply doesn't. Look at Basecamp. There's a reason they're switching (switched?) to a local SAN vs S3. It's insanely expensive to store anything more than tens of gigabytes in the cloud if you need DAS-like performance.
When it comes to bullet-proofing a system, automate the hell out of it, and skip the service contracts. Buy redundancies.
So taking that out of the equation, you're left with hardware and bandwidth. I imagine Netflix didn't get the same off-the-shelf price you or I would, so speculating on what their TCO is and how it would compare to a local build-out is probably fruitless.
For a small business, you can keep your hard costs (hardware/cabinets/power/bandwidth) under $10K/month and get a terabyte of memory in a pair of Dell R910s, a triply redundant 44TB SAN, a couple beefy Dell R610s with 96GB of RAM for database servers, Flash for the table-spaces and SAN read/write caches.
You can't come close to that kinda of power at AWS pricing.
Sure there may be cases where AWS makes sense at scale, but there are many more where it simply doesn't. Look at Basecamp. There's a reason they're switching (switched?) to a local SAN vs S3. It's insanely expensive to store anything more than tens of gigabytes in the cloud if you need DAS-like performance.
When it comes to bullet-proofing a system, automate the hell out of it, and skip the service contracts. Buy redundancies.
Oh, and stay far away from Oracle/Sun. ;-)