I agree with the second half (devops complexity) but not the first half (surprise billing). And I only agree with the first part if you're running a small-to-me

I agree with the second half (devops complexity) but not the first half (surprise billing). And I only agree with the first part if you're running a small-to-medium scale operation (I.E. you don't have 2+ devops engineers). It's not that hard to avoid the infamous "AWS surprise". Just pay attention to the costs of things, and check the billing page regularly until you're comfortable with how your infrastructure is affecting the cost. Devops complexity is a trickier topic. If you're running a startup or a small tech team, AWS can quickly mire you in delays as you become the AWS expert (or delegate one of your engineers to become the AWS expert). It's a lot easier to just use DigitalOcean or something. That said, AWS/GCP/Azure scale in a way that other providers don't. Not in terms of technical scalability, but in terms of organizational scalability. Once you hire 2 or more devops engineers, it's likely that their expertise in AWS will pay dividends, and hamstringing them with something that isn't industry-standard is going to frustrate them and you.