But you see part of the magic trick was Amazon spent years having companies like Garnter proclaim that cloud was cheaper, and nobody could possibly do on-premises IT cheaper because of economies of scale. As a result you've got CIOs everywhere trying to make a name for themselves by driving their company to the cloud to show immense cost savings. They don't have time to be bothered by the actual financial models or real costs. By the time finance realizes what happened they'll be on to the next gig.
It was honestly brilliant, the number of "cloud first" strategies that originated in board rooms filled with people that don't know the first thing about IT is kind of disgusting.
Small businesses don't care because they are too busy surviving.
Medium businesses don't care because why break what works?
Large businesses don't care because their managerial careers promote short-term priorities and marquee "transformation" projects which are buzzword-driven, and cloud is the current one.
Life goes on. It happens all the time. The trick is to learn and be smarter next time.
There are off the shelf things for, say, S3 and ALB which are entirely workable, but once you start getting into more complicated stuff (like S3's new consistency semantics, or SQS) then you're looking at a whole small company (at a minimum) worth of additional work. It's a non-trivial expansion, even for a large org with lots of money.
You can avoid using these sorts of services to maintain flexibility/independence, but you lose out on their unique benefits. This isn't an accident. It's not like you're going to be able to selfhost an SES clone and get the same kind of deliverability percentages as AWS netblocks, no matter how many engineers you throw at the problem.
Some of the goods you just can't get anywhere else, and they know it.
Aurora - tidb or vitess or cockroachdb or citus etc etc
Glacier - there is backblaze, also onprem vendors
Sqs - just use Nats
Having said that, and please keep in mind that I do not have an idea much about hardware so this is a guesswork; more of a question than a statement..., I do think that the Graviton price vs performance might not have a direct benefit outside of AWS. It's cool for AWS because they have less stuff to manage at that scale and it might be cheaper for them to buy and iterate because only they use it. It looks great to the clients because the perception is that the value is better. But AWS runs 80 AZs in 25 regions so it benefits them at that scale.
Realistically, even if one had couple of hundreds of racks, does it matter at that scale?
SQS is a message queue service. It's a bit weird to claim that as "simply aren't directly available as selfhosted replacements", a message queue is pretty basic stuff.
I'm super into self-hosted shared-nothing queue services, but what AWS is doing with SQS is anything but basic stuff.
It's not limited to some. You absolutely need a whole new team (or teams) to handle your infrastructure, your high availability needs, and also your security.
The nifty serverless offerings and other features are just nice-to-haves in comparison to the core infrastructure work that cloud providers put into your system to keep it running.
Just because cloud providers like GCP and AWS and Azure and etc have everything put together to let you setup your whole infra by running a small script that does not mean nothing needs to be done in order for that to work.
My company recently shifted from on prem to cloud. And we aren’t primarily a software company (although, much like most companies, we are increasingly turning into one).
We outsourced our data center needs, and I don’t remember us ever facing these middle of the night massive breakdowns (we had load balancing between a couple of data centers) and the number of ops issues hasn’t reduced a bit since the switchover.
I do think it’s been easier to improve performance for non US customers, because spinning up servers in data centers across the world seems a little easier around the world, but the millions saved by self hosting would have easily paid for someone to spin us up a Singapore and UK colo servers.