[sseveran]

The value of AWS is all the other services that they offer. While you could assemble them yourself, building on AWS allows you to move really fast and scalable infrastructure.

[tedmiston]

Things like load balancers and database servers especially, though they do charge a pretty penny for the latter.

[sseveran]

I use RDS Postgres and gladly pay for it. Love its snapshotting, backing up and failover.