[owenmarshall]

Those positive cash flow services are managed. It’s cheaper to run your own Postgres instance in EC2 than it is to run RDS, until you have to pay someone to operationalize it.

You pay $.09 an hour more for an RDS m5.large than you do for an EC2 m5.large. What kind of DBA can you get for $67 a month? That’s maybe one hour of a good DBA’s time per month, tops.

Now, someone will correctly point out that you can run way more compute on a colo’d server than an EC2 instance and they’d be right. But when you realize you’re paying AWS for hypervisor patching, network automation - I’ve worked in places where a security group change in AWS was equivalent to a two week servicenow ticket with the network team - ...

The business perspective to AWS is that you bake operational costs into the product and stop paying people that generate those costs. Not good for sysadmins who aren’t willing to change, but it’s where we are. And it’s why you can’t just say “open source makes this convertible without difficulty” - somebody’s still gotta manage those services ;)