most cost cuts come from automation (as you already noticed). but not just more automation in ops/sysadmin space, but mostly because you can just free resources

most cost cuts come from automation (as you already noticed). but not just more automation in ops/sysadmin space, but mostly because you can just free resources you don't need. especially one-off jobs (analytics, etc.) take a huge amount of resources for a very short amount of time and after that time the resources aren't needed. on clouds you can hope to schedule them preemtivly. also most cost savings come at night, if you are not active on the whole globe you probably only need half of your resources at night. even if your global the chances are high that at some time you still need way less resources. etsy is a marketplace on most marketplaces there are times where demand is really high and demand is certainly not so high. (christmas, black firday, regressions, etc..) also if you self host, high availability can and is a pain. monitoring your database is a pain, it takes a huge amount of time, which most companies do not have. p.s. working at a small company and services like RDS/gcloud postgres! (thanks google) google buckets (not sure how they are called their name is not as cool as s3)/S3 are a huge win for us.