I use ansible to provision Centos 7 instances, and then I use another playbook to install and configure stuff on them like haproxy, bind 9, etc...
This leaves me in complete control and keeps prices low because I only ever use vanilla instances.
I'm not on Amazon right now, but when I was I used to use ansible to configure networking on it and security groups etc, but I would always try to keep the vendor specific stuff to a minimum.
If you’re using Amazon as a glorified colo, you’ve got the worse of both worlds. You’re spending more on infrastructure and you’re not taking advantage of managed services to decrease the time and staff you spend on babysitting infrastructure. There is a lot more to AWS than VMs.
I'm using an internal cloud service at my company. It does not offer any managed services.
Also when I do use AWS for clients, I _sometimes_ use managed services¹, but most of those lock you in to Amazon. Some clients don't care, some do. They are paying, so I don't care either way.
In either case, I spend very little time babysitting infrastructure, just FYI, even when I use bare instances.
And in my opinion² if people aren't careful about managed services, then they won't have any OS knowledge anymore, and will just be left with product knowledge.
Sure, managed services make things easier, but they also make your sysadmin muscles weak.
1: Aurora DB for example. That one I like because there's no lock in. I can always move my tables to a standalone MySQL.
2: As someone who is 100% comfortable using bare Linux without having to use containers, managed services, control panels or even google searches to keep my stuff running, and have been doing so since the early 90s.
Sure, managed services make things easier, but they also make your sysadmin muscles weak.
I want my sysadmin muscles to be weak. I’m not saying that sysadmin isn’t important, but why spend time managing servers and doing the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” instead of adding value and dealing more with strategy?
This leaves me in complete control and keeps prices low because I only ever use vanilla instances.
I'm not on Amazon right now, but when I was I used to use ansible to configure networking on it and security groups etc, but I would always try to keep the vendor specific stuff to a minimum.