Cost matters to all businesses. But you have to do proper accounting. Do I hire more people on my team to build automation to create our database clusters, or do I just punch a button and then pay the bill? There must be a point where it makes sense to roll your own, but that point is likely to be fairly high up.
Whenever I hear that someone 'can do it cheaper', I often find that the math is not correct.
By the way, if you are not big enough that the relative cost of a VM between cloud providers is the primary concern, guess what, some of the services mentioned are really cheap – in some cases cheaper than running your own in whatever provider. You don't have to maintain VMs 24/7 to store data on S3, or to make use of SNS, SQS, DynamoDB. Lambda is the poster child for not maintaining servers
If you are really tiny, go use those services instead of wasting any time spinning up servers.
PS: If you want to try this is my referral code (10$ off): https://app.cloud66.com/referral?code=IOwgnqPHIEJwEzG
Somebody else said it best. People go to the cloud not to escape the hardware, it is to escape all the people who administrate the hardware. Truer words have never been spoken. Escaping all the gatekeepers of traditional setups adds significant value to a company.
That might be why uninformed people do it. But the real cost of managing your own hardware is devops, which doesn’t actually go away on the cloud.
Not using multi-cloud or not having a super trivial way to switch is just negligence and wouldn’t be tolerated in any large businesses.
Cool. It sounds like money doesn’t matter to you because you’ve identified a really high margin business and time to market is critical. This doesn’t match how 99% of businesses work though.