[solatic]

> because it can’t hire some system administrators?

Spoken like someone who has never worked in the public sector. Hiring can easily take 6+ months or more due to an ever-increasing list of requirements that government HR is required to fulfill, not least of which is passing a security clearance which takes even more time. The best people on the market rarely have the patience for this. Once your employees do get hired - on-boarding can take another few/several/more months, getting various permissions, technical documentation, etc. Everything is out-of-date because making changes requires committee consensus, in a culture that is risk-averse, because nobody notices when you out-perform (after all, the requirements were also set by a committee that doesn't know who you are) but something going wrong is grounds for termination. Public sector work over-relies on hiring contractors precisely to shift blame for failure to the contractors. Managed database services are excellent tools to shift this kind of catastrophic risk of data loss to a contractor/vendor (who is managing the database).

Governments not owning their data isn't due to technical or budgetary limitations - it's strictly cultural.

[NomDePlum]

Fully agree with this. I'd also add that a lot of IT is buy not build, in general. That includes support. Particularly true for the public sector and has been in place well before AWS existed.

Outsourcing the complexity to run and maintain a secure reliable database cluster really is making good use of the managed service model.

[Dylan16807]

> Hiring can easily take 6+ months or more

Do you think this move didn't take even longer to plan?

> to shift blame

That reason is much more plausible.