Or just the peace of mind of being able to fully recreate infrastructure easily, if need be.
Code, you know, version control, diffs, CI/CD pipelines, inherent live "documentation" (up to a point, of course you won't know the "why", but you'll know most of the "how" and "what", git offering the "who").
But at what price… I have said it here many times, but I am a nobody so I can repeat it; one of my weekend side businesses is optimising overall performance for companies. They contact me with something like ‘I am paying 50k$/mo for aws and out app still goes down with traffic’. The case I did today one month ago was doing 10k/mo on aws and that jumps up mentally with traffic. This is a SaaS site and startup and they are bootstrapped. I moved all over to docker compose and then to a $10/mo vps; it didn’t crash and burn and now they make profit. This is not apples to apples; they made a complete shitshow on aws and in their code and their db (on rds). So I fixed some things and moved it over. On aws this improved setup would still be 10x or more expensive. It is very visible that most startup owners never saw a crisis now; this took me 12 hours… so that’s about 2k$ cost for me for a $9990 saving per month.
How much of the cost discrepancy was due to issues inherent with AWS, versus extremely poor engineering on the part of the startup? As a trivial example, I too can rack up a massive cloud bill by provisioning a 128 core VM for a web app that only sees a few thousand hits per day. But the massive bill isn’t the fault of the cloud provider; it’s the fault of my own bad engineering choices.
Yes, I agree, hence I said not apples to apples, but like said, the same exact vps costs over 10x as much on aws. That’s not good.
I encounter 10-10000x higher bills on aws ; most 0s are self inflicted but the last few 0s I don’t think you can erase in the same way with aws vs a good vps provider.
Code, you know, version control, diffs, CI/CD pipelines, inherent live "documentation" (up to a point, of course you won't know the "why", but you'll know most of the "how" and "what", git offering the "who").