Of course, even companies like Salesforce, SAP have little cottage industries sprung up around them that do the “requirement analysis”, setup, maintenance, etc.

Of course, even companies like Salesforce, SAP have little cottage industries sprung up around them that do the “requirement analysis”, setup, maintenance, etc. I always wonder if it’d not be effectively cheaper to hire a parttime sysadmin to manage one’s own servers than all this trouble companies now go to with AWS/Azure. A while back, I had a good look at the AWS offerings, and they were alluring enough to someone in the early stages of anything. But the initial knowledge-barrier is not too low (there are even courses on AWS) - so why wouldn’t I instead to use my preexisting Unix skills to do it by hand; and why wouldn’t a beginner choose to learn the (not too hard, and IMO of comparable complexity as AWS) basics of handling storage etc in Unix than to pay a vendor. The moment one is at even intermediate scale, having one’s own setup seems more practical.