Of the services you list, S3 is OK. I would rather admin an RDBMS than use RDS at small scale
> Large enough customers also don't pay list price for AWS.
At that scale the cost savings on not hiring sysadmins becomes much smaller, so what is the case for using AWS? The absolute cost savings will be huge.
Even "only" ECS users often benefit from load balancing there. Other clouds sometimes have their own (Hetzner), but generally it's kind of a hard problem to do well, if you don't have a cloud service like Elastic IP's that you can use to handle fail over.
Generally everywhere I've worked has been pretty excited to have a lot more than just ecs managed for them. There's still a strong perception that other people managing services is a wonderful freedom. I'd love some day if the stance could shift some, if the everyday operator felt a little more secure doing some of their own platform engineering, if folks had faith in that. Having a solid secure day-2 stance starts with simple pieces but isnt simple, is quite hard, with inherent complexity: I'm excited by those many folks out there saddling up for open source platform engineering works (operators/controllers).
Pretty much everyone offers load balancing and IPs that can be moved between servers and VPSs. Even if you have to switch to new IPs DNS propagation will not take as long as waiting out an AWS shutdown.
10% of what? Users, instances/capacity...? If its users then its a lot higher because it it gets commoner the smaller users are.
> There's still a strong perception that other people managing services is a wonderful freedom.
The argument is really about whether that is a perception of a reality. If you can fit everything on one box (which is a LOT these days) then its easy to manage your own stuff. if you cannot you are probably big enough to employ people to manage it (which is discussed in other comments) and you still have to deal with the complexity of AWS (also discussed elsewhere in the comments).
