Depends a lot on your situation. AWS is a way to trade money for engineering time. Sure, you can run your own OpenSearch/PostgreSQL/Kubernetes cluster “cheaper”

Depends a lot on your situation. AWS is a way to trade money for engineering time. Sure, you can run your own OpenSearch/PostgreSQL/Kubernetes cluster “cheaper” than their managed offerings. But that’s the keyword: _managed_. If you use their (or other cloud provider’s) managed services, you can just turn it on and expect it to be there, available and running all the time (or at least to however many 9s the promise). You don’t have to worry about configuration, management and maintenance on the whole infrastructure, software upgrades, backups, etc. They take a bunch of worries off the table. Sure, they don’t do it for free. But if you (like many companies these days) lack manpower in the engineering department, using managed services can be a way to use the people you have more efficiently. So yeah, approach AWS with caution, be sure you don’t set things up in ways where your costs could suddenly explode. Do the math vs. DYI infrastructure, but don’t forget that your own engineering time isn’t free.