Things AWS solves for me that I've always wanted to have solved:
* Database administration
* Security best practices by default
* Updated infrastructure
* Automatic load balancing
* Trivial credentials management
* 2FA for all infra administration
* Container image repositories
* Distributed file systems
I was and old-school bare-metal UNIX systems admin 15 years ago. Each of those things, in medium to large companies, would take a full-time sysadmin to keep it all up to date.
Same. I used to really hate "cloud" given I was old-school devops and could do all of these things listed above with self-written management tools and a sprinkling of Ansible. However, I think in the past year, I've seen the light, shaved off my neckbeard, and have really enjoyed the lightening of shoulders of not having to think about things problems that no longer exist.
Many companies want disaster recovery and multi-region deployments without the capital expenses required to deploy this themselves.
I don't want to have to buy hardware from a vendor, find cabinet space, negotiate peering and power agreements, deal with 3am alerts for failed NICs, or hear about someone spending hours freeing up disk space while waiting on new drives to arrive.
I want the benefit of all these things, but I'd rather pay a premium for it over time than deal with the upfront capital expenses.
The problem is that not everyone wants to self-host, not everyone wants to manage hardware, and not everyone's tech scales in an extremely predictable and easy way. We launched a new tenant that required a bunch of new EC2s, databases, etc. Was trivial with AWS with terraform. If we did our own homegrown solution we would have had to have that hardware either ordered and waited on or have that hardware ready in reserve just burning cash doing nothing.
* Database administration
* Security best practices by default
* Updated infrastructure
* Automatic load balancing
* Trivial credentials management
* 2FA for all infra administration
* Container image repositories
* Distributed file systems
I was and old-school bare-metal UNIX systems admin 15 years ago. Each of those things, in medium to large companies, would take a full-time sysadmin to keep it all up to date.