Having managed a small data center in the past and having seen what it takes to manage multiple enterprise-scale data centers, the answer is "no, AWS does it better."
The company that I'm in right now has two engineers (including myself) who are building and maintaining a product that serves millions of streams a week. There's no fucking way we could have done this ourselves. One F5 would cost more than our entire total AWS bill for two years - and we'd have to have at least 4 F5s if we wanted to try to match AWS. Plus the media encoders would cost a fortune.
For some things it's fine to head over to lowendbox.com and pick up a cheap VPS hosting package. We could theoretically build our stack on top of a bunch of VPSs, sync everything with rsync, etc. But then we'd be spending time building infrastructure (which is pretty much valueless) instead of our product.
The company that I'm in right now has two engineers (including myself) who are building and maintaining a product that serves millions of streams a week. There's no fucking way we could have done this ourselves. One F5 would cost more than our entire total AWS bill for two years - and we'd have to have at least 4 F5s if we wanted to try to match AWS. Plus the media encoders would cost a fortune.
For some things it's fine to head over to lowendbox.com and pick up a cheap VPS hosting package. We could theoretically build our stack on top of a bunch of VPSs, sync everything with rsync, etc. But then we'd be spending time building infrastructure (which is pretty much valueless) instead of our product.