Try to see the forest for the trees here: ask yourself how does the business make money? If I throw my application on some PaaS thing and put the database on R

Try to see the forest for the trees here: ask yourself how does the business make money? If I throw my application on some PaaS thing and put the database on RDS, let’s say I can hire 5 developers who know almost nothing about infrastructure to develop and deploy the application. Each developer working on the application delivers valuable business logic. Let’s say each developer makes $200,000 total compensation and they bring in $500,000 in revenue. This setup makes me $1,500,000 in operating income per year. Now you’re saying I should find someone who knows enough about infrastructure architecture who database administration and all the other bare metal Linux fundamental topics to manage it in house rather than paying AWS all this wasteful money. So now I have 4 developers and 1 Ops/DBA person. My AWS bill was eliminated, saving $100,000 thanks to the infrastructure and database expert doing a wonderful job cost optimizing. But now my 4 developers have one less person to deliver features that motivate customers to sign deals with us, so now we’re making $1,300,000 operating income. (Losing $300k from the loss of a developer and gaining $100k back from cost savings. Obviously this is a made up scenario in my favor but that’s basically how it works. Businesses shopping for employees can’t get every skill they want in a job description. One of the most important parts of business strategy is making trade-offs. This scenario reminds me of a landlord that I had who fixed a simple problem with my dishwasher by just replacing it with a new one. They didn’t give a shit that a little bit of extra knowledge and a spare part would have fixed it for no exaggeration 100x lower cost, because resolving the problem quickly with no risk was worth more to them. In any event, I was giving that landlord many times the cost of that dishwasher every month. The compliance certifications are kind of like the real estate agent that has a big car payment on their Mercedes so that they can sell more expensive houses to wealthier clients. Yes, we all know that buying a Mercedes isn’t the most cost effective way to get from point A to B, but you can’t sell mansions if you show up in a Kia Rio.