Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two kinds of cloud users - those who treat their cloud as a VM to use, and those who actually use all the fancy API features. The first group are almost always better served by dedicated VMs or hardware from a provider specializing in the, if the VM is long-lived.
I'm still not a fan of the second way. If you develop all your software to tightly integrate with AWS, you might save time developing the software but create a huge amount of technical debt. Managing your own infrastructure (with dedicated servers, so no hardware management) isn't too hard, even if you're a small shop. And managing a fleet of AWS services isn't necessarily less work. Maybe there's a reason all ads fo…
If you have infra skills then absolutely, it's way simpler to manage. But infra people like don't really fit in "small shops" because the price tag for one of us is (depending on the cost of living) anywhere between a quarter and half a mil total comp. And if you ever want them to take a vacation not on-call you'll need at least three. I say this against my own interest, just go with the managed services and consider it "good problems to have" when you feel the itch to hire some infra person to clean up the debt.