I don't agree about avoiding the services. If you're mega successful down the line you can likely afford to do the migration when it's expensive, but the servi

I don't agree about avoiding the services. If you're mega successful down the line you can likely afford to do the migration when it's expensive, but the services are what save you_time_, and initially money too. I can spin up an RDS server that is secure and production ready in less than 5 minutes that quite frankly I don't need to touch for a very very long time. If we need more power, I can restart the instance with a bigger type, or if we've overspecced I can use a smaller one. Compared to running your own instances on ec2 there's a few hours of poking around to do things like password handling, backups, logs, not to mention you're now responsible for managing updates and the likes. It's a false economy to avoid them IMO. That's not to say you should immediately pivot to all in AWS all the time but like any engineering be aware of the price you're paying to build Vs buy