Typical statement from someone that doesn’t actually pay the bill (a.k.a a software engineer in most companies).

It’s easy to trivialize $20-30k a month when it’s someone else’s money and it’s less work for you.

When considering the cost of having a secure server room, a commercial internet line, electricity, cooling and hardware - plus the cost of my time (or someone else's on the team), AWS gets more and more attractive. The business side paying the bill agrees fully.

People on my time would rather be developing software than doing sys admin stuff

There is a continuum between "I run servers in my basement" and "I pay mid 5 figures monthly to have autoscaled autofailover hotstandby 1s-interval backed up cluster across three AZs".

I use AWS, DO and Hetzner (bare metal) for (different) cases where each makes sense.

In the past few years, maintenance burden and uptime between AWS and Hetzner hosted stuff was comparable, with the cost being an order of magnitude less for Hetzner (as an added benefit, that machine is more beefy but I wasn't even comparing that).

> People on my time would rather be developing software than doing sys admin stuff.

I am not surprised software developers would prefer doing software development :-)

my point is $20-30k/m for an AWS database can actually be a bargain

> The business side paying the bill agrees fully.

No, they often don’t understand the alternatives available because the wolves are guarding the henhouse (software devs who don’t want to work with the pace of on-prem IT).

> People on my time would rather be developing software than doing sys admin stuff

No shit, that’s why software devs aren’t sysadmins.