I write C++ business API servers. On the type of hardware I rent from Hetzner /OVH they're capable of processing thousands of requests per second. This would cover probably 90+ percent of real world businesses.
>"an API for everything"
Not sure what you mean here. API for what in particular? My servers talk to partner systems of real businesses. We consume their APIs and they consume ours. Integration is done by little plugins that translate requests should it be needed. I am not sure how Amazon will help in this department. The only generic API that everyone uses is email but you do not need Amazon for that. As for database - I always deploy one local to my business server.
>"good customer support"
Frankly in many years there was like 2-3 times when I needed something resembling support from Hetzner / OVH. In either case the response was prompt and satisfactory.
There are many use cases where hosting fee is not the right thing to optimize for.
> Not sure what you mean here.
I assume referring to APIs for controlling and monitoring the infrastructure, not anything about APIs you may provide in your application or consume from external sources.
Old-school dedicated servers are so cheap that you can match a startups' peak autoscaled load and still pay less than their "idle" load.
1. Have you done a security review and ideally pen-testing from a 3rd party? Are you fully TLS from end to end, are you aware of any exploitable vector from your API/UI and how you mitigate them
2. How do you handle software patching and vulnerabilities?
3. Do you consider your app Operational ready? Can you rollback, do you audit changes, do you need multi-AZ resilience, do you need cell based arch. Did someone other than yourself or outside your team look at your monitoring dashboard? Do you need to be paged at 3am if some of your dependencies or underlying node degrades. We have to answer a 50 questions template and review it multiple times..
4. Did you calculate the cost and forecast it with how the service/app may grow in the next 12-36 months?
While you still need to do all this when using a Cloud providers, you probably _should_ do much more if you manage the bare metal
If you have already done all those, Kudos to you, but I still find it hard to trust everyone who DIY
>" but I still find it hard to trust everyone who DIY"
It depends on what is the actual DIY part is. In any way it is your problem. Not mine. Sorry to say but to me your whole post feels like typical FUD scaremongering client to cloud.
>"While you still need to do all this when using a Cloud providers, you probably _should_ do much more if you manage the bare metal"
No I should not probably do much more. I do much less as I have way less moving parts.
I build products. That is my primary output. And the actual delivery is a binary executable that does the job. And it does it with the stellar performance that makes all that horizontal scaling infra totally unneeded. I serve the needs of my clients, not the needs of Amazon.