Owning YOUR platform is not more expensive

Owning your platform sounds expensive.

"We can't afford ops people to manage servers."

"Security is scary."

"We don't want to manage a database."

However, at the scale of most industrial products, none of these things are very hard.

A couple servers can easily handle all your traffic.

A backup and restore plan can handle failures in most cases. Redundancy and high-availability are overkill.

Cloud services require management too -- often you end of managing the cost instead of the fundamental issues listed above. Six of one, half-dozen of the other -- take your pick. And then you still have to deal with problems -- often due to the distributed nature of cloud services where the network is the weak link.

See DHH's posts on "leaving the cloud" for an example. They are saving millions owning and managing their own servers and it is not any more work.

You can hitch up to one of the major cloud vendors and go all in on their services -- that is what everyone else is doing.

Or you can do something different. Take the technology that is being developed for the cloud, use the cloud where it make sense, and then optimize for YOUR Platform.