Not knowing your situation exactly, but there could be a cost of running your own infrastructure and not taking advantage of their services? For example, are the chances of losing data higher in riak (take into account disaster and operational bugs that could result in data loss or availability issues) than in one of amazon's supported data stores.
I don't necessarily disagree with what you are saying but there is cost of doing everything yourself.
You would have been equally protected if you had been in more than one region.
Yes. There's a cost to every decision you make. Sometimes it's the cost of s3 being down. Sometimes it's the cost of some developer time to make services agnostic. The value of that isn't immediately obvious, perhaps.
But the developer cost here (my time) was worth it. Our shit wasn't down, while everyone else's was.
I also want to point out that I spent minimal time setting this up. We can deploy to GCE or commodity VPCs at a moment's notice, and that a project I did over a couple of weekends piggybacking on the ansible playbooks I wrote for AWS.
It's not that hard. You have to get your developers on board with being provider agnostic, and you have to be agnostic yourself. But it is not insurmountable.
It also help when you're the lead dev or your team and also have a good relationship with the devops guy. :)
I don't necessarily disagree with what you are saying but there is cost of doing everything yourself.
You would have been equally protected if you had been in more than one region.