In my experience the percieved value of AWS is management that thinks they can get away with fewer sysadmins because of the managed spirit of AWS. In a way, thi

In my experience the percieved value of AWS is management that thinks they can get away with fewer sysadmins because of the managed spirit of AWS. In a way, this is true, because what eventually happens is that the company ends up employing no or very few sysadmins, and expects developers to pick up the slack by branding sysadmin work as "devops". If you manage to get away with it, AWS savings are in workforce costs. But i don't think every company _can_ get away with it, and by the time you realize you'd be better off on-prem, you will have already churned all your devs into AWS experts and fired all your sysadmins. Amazon knows this and expects it, that's why they sell training courses that you must pay for as an employer.