They throw bodies because they have them and they are looking to solve a problem. And they do automate, claims that a service like S3 does not have automation

They throw bodies because they have them and they are looking to solve a problem. And they do automate, claims that a service like S3 does not have automation are totally ridiculous, and few other general hosting providers have AWS scale here. That said, their development pace is crazy, with plenty of partially built solutions -> so yes, until something scales enough to need it I'm not surprised they have sysadmin toil. Reality is even the VMware worlds and other onprem stuff, even when "automated" have plenty of turmoil just staying fresh / current / backed up / secured etc. So that's what AWS is selling.