| As a Staff+ Engineer -- Principal in a couple of weeks -- for me it's about "batteries included", support availability, and ability to hire. Using a cloud platform means that while your needs are small, you're overpaying. Where it pays off is when you have a new requirement that needs to be met quickly. I've done my share of managing database instances in the past. I can spin up a new RDS Postgres instance in much less time than I can configure one from scratch, though. Do we need a read replica? Multi-site failover? Do we need to connect it to Okta, or Formal, so we can stand up a process to provision access to specific databases, tables, or even columns? All of those things I can do significantly faster and more quickly on AWS than I can do it by hand. What if a NoSQL database is the right solution for us? I have much less experience adminning those, so will either have to allocate a fair amount of my time to skill up or hire someone who already has those skills. Need a scheduled task? Sure, I could set up a Jenkins server somewhere and we could use that... or we could just add an ECS scheduled task to our existing cluster. Need an API endpoint to handle inbound Zoom events and forward them to an internal queue? Sure, I can set up a new VPC for that... that'll be a couple of days... or we whip up a Lambda, hook it up to API Gateway, and be up and running in a couple of hours. AWS helps me do more in less time - and my time is a cost to the business. It's also extremely flexible, and will let us add things far more quickly than we otherwise could. IMO, the correct comparison isn't "what would it cost to run this platform on Hetzner?" - it's "What would it cost to run it, plus what would cost to acquire the talent to build it, plus retain that talent to maintain it?" AWS isn't competing with other infrastructure providers. They're competing with other providers and the salaries of the engineers you need to make them work. |