Since 2010, Optoro has used Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud-computing provider. We relied on them to supply the horsepower needed to drive our IT resources and applications. However, after some hard analysis, we decided to move away from the AWS and onto our own infrastructure. At a time when so many SaaS’s/IaaS’s/PaaS’s exist, why would we decide to run a data-center’s worth of gear? AWS has been a large drain on our budget at scale, and we wanted a more cost-efficient solution.