It's not just about separating business logic from "cloud plumbing". It's building you infrastructure around services that cannot simply be replaced elsewhere,

It's not just about separating business logic from "cloud plumbing". It's building you infrastructure around services that cannot simply be replaced elsewhere, or cannot be replaced easily - if you want to move from AWS Kinesis to (say) Kafka for message broking, or from DynamoDB to Postgres. There is a reason Amazon gives away a lot of free credits to startups, and it's the same reason drug dealers give away free samples. If the economics are right, and growth is strong then you might be okay - but you also don't want to find yourself with a $100k/month AWS bill in a startup with only $2m of annual revenue. (P.S Greetings from the other side of the Spree. I love La Lucha on your street!)