This is so ridiculous. I have to argue endlessly (and again for every employee) with IT support and enterprise security to give them the ability to upload attachments on Teams.
But giving that same person access to start a few $100/hour instances on AWS? No problem.
The balance is completely out of whack once your infra is on AWS.
If you need 5 seconds of compute time per day then running that as a Lambda makes perfect sense. If you need a database server that's available 24/7 then I can't see how hosting that on Amazon could be cheaper.
(Unless you're employing a full time ops person to look after that one server, in which case you'll have to do your own maths.)
I have this setup on AWS and look at "bringing it home" every year but the nightmare of having to assure a good level of availability is not worth the saving of a few extra $1000 per year for us at least. Completely different issues not related to your HW can happen, your office internet simply goes down or power goes out while you're on vacation etc..
At least there is major competition between a lot of cloud providers nowadays so nobody can get away with insane prices anymore. Though, would be cool to see some kind of standardised price comparision metric for medium/high complexity cloud setups. Sort of how you compare grocery prices, you have a standard purchase list.
Uh, yeah, that's why you pay IT people to do that sort of thing. Hiring your own will almost certainly be less expensive than paying Amazon's people, and provides you more control and more options in the event of any problems. It's not like AWS never has problems, and when it does all you can do is twiddle your thumbs until someone else fixes it.
The free tier of AWS lambdas has enough room to do non-trivial applications for free, and in EC2 we can get t2.micro and t3.micro instances (2vCPU, 1GB RAM) with 750h/month for free, which pretty much means you can have the instance running the whole month for free.
Depending on what you need to do, in the very least it's possible to run a system (or parts of it ) for free, which is hard to beat.
Having said this, allowing a system architect to go nuts with AWS without being mindful of its cost is something that easily gets far too expensive far too fast. If all anyone wants is EC2 and there's no need for global deployments then you'd be better off going with cloud providers such as Hetzner. A couple of minutes with a calculator and a napkin at hand is enough to arrive at the conclusion that AWS makes absolutely no sense, cost-wise.
Shifting any non trivial infrastructure into AWS verbatim is always more expensive than running it yourself. You need to rearchitect it carefully around the PaaS services to make a cost saving or even break even.
An extreme example of this is it cousin who works for a small dev company doing LOB stuff. They moved their SQL box into EC2 and it’s costing more to run that single RDS instance than their entire legacy infra cost was per year.
I’d still rather use AWS though. The biggest gain is not technology but not having to argue with several vendor sales teams or file a PO and wait for finance to approve it. All I do is click a button and the thing’s there.