I've spent the last 3 years doing AWS stuff at work and agree 100%. If all you're using is EC2 then it's not a great value. Where it's worthwhile are the other

I've spent the last 3 years doing AWS stuff at work and agree 100%. If all you're using is EC2 then it's not a great value. Where it's worthwhile are the other services you can tie in to really easily. At work we're using: SQS SNS RDS S3 Athena/Glue EMR CloudWatch Lambda CloudWatch Events EC2 Autoscaling, ELB, ALB Elasticsearch Service Glacier ElastiCache Route 53 CloudFront Data Pipeline It's spendy, no question. None of this is stuff you can't do yourself on cheap instances. We'd just need an additional 2-3 FTEs to maintain the homegrown jungle of crap that would replace the managed services. Oops, there went my savings.