[scarface74]

The point of the cloud is not to be ignorant about the infrastructure. It’s to not have to babysit hardware and focus on your core competency - let someone else do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting”. I’ve seen cases where “AWS Architects” spun up a bunch of EC2 instances and ran thier own services that had AWS managed equivalents and wonder why everything costs more.

Could it possibly be things like they have 3 EC2 instances to run a cluster for Consul instead of using AWS services?

It’s slso about elasticity. It’s much easier and cost effective to spin up 20 VMs (whether it be EC2 instances or Lambdas which are basically VMs) to run a test and see how many you actually need.

Other times it makes sense to use a bunch of spot instances to save money and choose a cost optimization based on throughout vs. cost for backend processing.