From a management standpoint, it takes at least 2 developers to run something equivalent. Perhaps not full time, but it doesn't scale out that much - not more

From a management standpoint, it takes at least 2 developers to run something equivalent. Perhaps not full time, but it doesn't scale out that much - not more than 10 highly available services per team. A good example of this is roughly a 3 instance RabbitMQ cluster used by ~100 people. 1. The "Bus Factor" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor 2. Context switching - if you have a developer that also works on coding or other things. So maybe it's not a full $240k/year for only 1 service, but the price in the door IS that. 2 to 3 extra services will cost no more - that's where AWS will make the money.