[jwe]

It's not so much about thinking that somebody else could do better.

By doing what they do they create the expectation that they _are_ doing better than everybody else.

[lemming]

And let's face it, despite bugs and human error that should be avoidable, they are.

[ssmoot]

At that scale, MAYBE.

In the last two years my workplace has gotten pretty good at handling SAN outages (due to terrible Oracle equipment).

Put simply, this set of scenarios can't happen at my work-place. We don't have that level of automation, there's only a pair of SAN systems in the mirrors, there's no "hunting for capacity".

I'd suggest most businesses are closer to this than AWS.

There's a lot of sugar coating going around saying "You couldn't build a better space-shuttle", and that's probably true. But if I only need an extremely reliable bicycle that's a false argument. The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work doesn't apply just to programming.