Last year I wrote about the AWS spend of my SaaS business, Cronitor [1]. I couldn't imagine building a service like this without modern cloud providers, but it is no wonder to me why AWS generates all of Amazon's profit.

Essentially our migration over the years looks like:

1) Moving to EC2 from a VPS, The Ec2 instance with same specs is notably slower and you need to add a second instance where one worked before.

2) Moving to a managed service like RDS after running the service on Ec2, managed service with same specs is notably slower and you need a second instance where one worked before.

In the end, it's worth it, in the RDS example you're getting millisecond replication times, point-in-time database recovery, hot failover, etc. But still, it would be great just once if you got the same performance from an RDS 2xl as you'd get running your own DB on a 2xl of your own.

[1] https://blog.cronitor.io/the-aws-spend-of-a-saas-side-busine...