My entire goal is for my services to never wake me up. And if they do it had better because I clearly messed up and am the sole human alive able to fix it.
There's no point in waking up when everything is blowing up if you don't have the access to fix the underlying issue. AWS doesn't actually guarantee 99.9% uptime. What they guarantee is they'll give you some company currency[1] if they can't meet or exceed 99.9% uptime.
So the next time the ship is on fire, don't worry, stay asleep and your Amazon account manager will be by shortly with a thimble of water to throw on you :)
[1] - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/03/aws-syste...
Bravo.
Having been on call for some truly monstrous amount of things and seen things break in all kinds of ways... I can't agree more with this principle.
While the cloud isn't cheap, if your org can afford it, there is no question about it: go with managed services. Focus on building things, leave the OPS to AWS/GCP/Azure.
I wish there was some easier way to quantify the “soft” aspects of everything that surrounds us, e.g. the long-term impact of beautiful and usable UI design, the reduction in “ambient” psychological stress, the impacts of chaos/consistency on how we feel, any robust measures of happiness, excitement, relaxation, etc.
They seem to be such important attributes, but not as easily measured as a latency. Which in turn makes reaching consensus harder—and probably why design by committee doesn't work?