Yes. I’ve found that the amount you have to learn to use a managed service often equals or exceeds the amount you have to learn to run something on EC2 or on-prem. The automation/management costs of AWS or equivalent are a lot higher than people think and not significantly different from the costs to learn Linux and enough networking to do an “old-fashioned” deploy.
Much of that rings true, but I find some of the cloud abstractions can help to make the steady-state ops time required lower (especially for a side project where you really don’t want to deal with life interruptions).
