Unless you're personally memorizing all the data then you're outsourcing the responsibility somewhere - either you're paying for a service that you hope will be compliant with its specification, or you're paying for hardware that you hope will be compliant with its specification and employees that you hope will be as skilled as they claim to be. There's no way to eliminate the risk entirely, all you can do is take the safest option available. These days that's often the cloud.
For plenty of use cases I actually agree with that conclusion. With the caveat that I would add: accompanied by a suitable non-cloud back-up of critical data, code and configuration data held on a medium that is not accessible by the same people that administer the cloud stuff.
I think for most levels of safety you would target, a pure cloud solution is going to be cheaper. E.g. if you decide you need a backup that's independent of your primary cloud provider and any staff with access to that, you can probably accomplish that more cheaply with a second cloud provider than by self-hosting.
What is it with you?Will all your home brew nonsense save your ass when your data is lost. I am basing all of my arguments on "what is the statistically most likely to fail" and "given limited resources where would you store your authoritative copy". The answers to these are "whatever you come up with will have a higher likelihood of failure" and "the authoritative copy goes into the cloud" You must be a terrible gambler. "Will playing the odds save your ass if you lose your money on good bet" no. But making good bets will increase your return regardless of the outcome of any given bet.
> "whatever you come up with will have a higher likelihood of failure"
This is where you are simply wrong.
> "the authoritative copy goes into the cloud"
This we agree on.
So, where you are wrong is this: you are only considering technical failure modes but there are many others besides and so any comparison between 'the cloud' and 'your get-out-jail-free-card-backup' would have to be in terms taking into account all modes of failure, not just the technical ones and then on top of that you'd have to consider the likelihood of the backup failing to restore at the same time that the primary system goes down for whatever reason (including technical ones).
That's why I call it a blind spot, even after being told in 20 different ways that the uptime of Amazon does not come into play here you are still clinging to that. It is simply not relevant because that's not the scenario a back-up will most likely prevent against. It will also prevent against that scenario, on top of the ones where someone incapacitated by drugs, anger, depression or any one of another set of circumstances decides to take it out on your company. Or maybe someone makes an honest mistake (I've been called out twice in my career to restore data for companies that had been wiped out because of simple mistakes that should have never ever happened).
So back-ups are not a luxury, they are a necessity and the degree to which Amazon can outperform your back-up in terms of availability is not a factor in the whole discussion.
