Yeah, I feel this way a lot. In recent years I've done work for companies where it feels like the end result of a lot of very expensive AWS infra is... more ex

Yeah, I feel this way a lot. In recent years I've done work for companies where it feels like the end result of a lot of very expensive AWS infra is... more expensive, and not really superior to things we had ten years ago when hosting on-prem. There's a level of scale for which distributed AWS/Azure is necessary, but I'm not sure how many shops need that. The devops guy at a previous gig thought I was some kind of naive simp for insisting we didn't need a cluster of Amazon's version of Redis. We were storing like, a megabyte of data in there. That's not a typo. It's not that he was an idiot. Smart guy actually. Not sure if he was just padding his resume with experience ("sure, I've admin'd Redis clusters!") or if he was locked into some kind of default thinking that wouldn't even allow him to consider some kind of minimal setup.