[OJFord]

My charitable reading of GP's comment is as a reaction to the fact that the project's been designed in such a way (Serverless :tm:) that AWS is required; a pre-requisite, not an example.

From the first quote you might think that it was the deployer's choice where to put it, including on one's own hardware.

I don't know, however, what you'd do instead of SES.