If anything my argument holds up because you're putting even more abstraction between you and your systems by using the managed services, which leads to less un

If anything my argument holds up because you're putting even more abstraction between you and your systems by using the managed services, which leads to less understanding of how things actually work. For instance, I went with running PostgreSQL instead of RDS because I have much more control over what's going on in the DB than I would with RDS. But your point that the managed services don't require ops might be true in the short term, but what happens when something breaks? Or you experience a level of growth that expands past the capabilities of the services you've organized? There's hard practical limits to all the of SaaS offerings - mostly latency and throughput - that doesn't really come up in these discussions. The analogy about it being like assembly programming might be more apt than I originally thought, given how not doing it yourself generally results in slower and poorly optimized solutions, but then "good enough" is often the mantra of the day at a certain scale.