> understanding your app and stack is a waste of time Yes. It's bikeshedding. How far do you go? Should people create their own Linux distro? Clearly they don

> understanding your app and stack is a waste of time Yes. It's bikeshedding. How far do you go? Should people create their own Linux distro? Clearly they don't "understand" their app or stack if they aren't creating the distro, right? And don't even get me started on libraries. If you use any libraries and haven't read 100% of the code and documentation, you couldn't possibly understand your app or stack. It must be best to do all of that before launching your product, right? Once all that is done, you should be able to launch within 5-10 years, which is only ~$2.5M in funding for a dev team of two. > Ignore learning efficiency in the name of padding cloud provider pockets, it's the only way! RDS has nothing to do with "learning efficiency" or understanding a stack. It's software. You remember software, don't you? It automates mundane tasks so that you don't have to do them. Upgrades, migrations, horizontal scaling, vertical scaling, backups... RDS does all of those things. And it costs, perhaps, $15/mo. more than a VPS.