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Assumption: Your business uses Amazon's EBS (because heh, you need to store your data somewhere between EC2 instance reboots/creation/destruction). EBS is down. What do you do? Hope AWS engineers get it back up fast? You can't do a damn thing about its reliability; you're stuck with whatever reliability Amazon has decided to deliver (which I think we can agree is much less than a company with revenue can depend on).

When you build your own system, you decide how reliable you want it. Otherwise, you can use Amazon and just live with the continual problems.

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> When you build your own system, you decide how reliable you want it.

Ha! You mean that you discover how hard and expensive it is to build your own reliable infrastructure or how hard it is to hire people to do it for you.

No offense, but I used to work at a DoE lab on data-taking from the Large Hadron Collider CMS detector.

It's not as expensive as you'd think. We were dealing with hundreds of petabytes of data, and customers much more demanding than your consumer paying $16/month to stream movies.

How big was your team? How much were your IT costs?

10 people; 4 people on the actual sysadmin/operations side, 6 people who managed the higher application layer for the distributed filesystem, job management, etc.

If you're just talking the spinning disk and servers, probably ~$5-6MM/year. If you include the StorageTek tape archives, add in another $5MM-10MM.

Netflix operating income for FY2011 was $376 million.