Sorry I should have explained that statement more -- that's the extreme case of the you-must-be-your-own-sysadmin, basically it represents an increase in ramp u

Sorry I should have explained that statement more -- that's the extreme case of the you-must-be-your-own-sysadmin, basically it represents an increase in ramp up time/time cost for everyone who is NOT in an organization. I was going with a bit of a universalist stance there, but it's overblown, you're right. That said, even having everyone on the ops team (let's say it's 1 or 2 people) be good sysadmins is still non-trivial effort. It takes time and more likely some misconfigurations and mistakes -- and that talent must be paid for (people are usually more expensive than servers). I do want to make it clear that I agree with all your points, I immensely enjoy learning it as well! For many companies it seems like it's still reasonable to pay $xxxx a month early on while finding product market fit (often offset by free credits), and lean in to all the dev talent that already knows how to do simple stuff on AWS. Much more a VC style playbook, but it'll probably be what people do till it gets prohibitively expensive.