[vacri]

No, you don't really. You don't need to spend time considering and researching different load balancers to see which one is the best for your use-case, running through your company's purchase process (in itself a big project), lead time, physical install, configuration, and monitoring. If you want an AWS load balancer, click EC2 > Load Balancers and config one. From "Hey, I'd like a load balancer" to having a functioning, active load balancer in literally less than five minutes. No jaunt to the colo necessary. And that's just one item - rinse, repeat for a pile of other aspects as well.

It's not true that AWS gets rid of the need for sysadmins, but it's absolutely not true that you do all the same sysadmin tasks on a cloud service.

[regularfry]

This is why we have managed hosting. You can pay someone else to do all that, on a real, physical server, on a network they manage, and have it still come out as much cheaper than AWS. Yes, the turnaround time might be more than 5 minutes. Or, depending on who you go to, it might be less.