100% agree.

AWS is very cost efficient for other services (S3,SES,SQS, etc) but virtual machines are not a good deal. You get less RAM & CPU, with the virtualization overhead, and pay a lot more money.

Especially for Postgres if you run some tests with pgbench you can really see the penalty you pay for virtualization.

Maybe the sysadmin skill of being able to build your own infrastructure is becoming a lost art, otherwise I can't explain why people are so in love with paying 5x for less performance.

Hetzner is cheap and reliable in Europe, if you're in North America take a look at OVH. Especially their cost-saving alternative called SoYouStart. You can get 4/8 4.5ghz, 64 RAM and an NVME drive for $65.

(I have no affiliation with OVH, I'm just a customer with almost 100 servers, and it's worked out great for me)

AWS’s value proposition is dead simple to understand if you’ve actually used it. You said it yourself. AWS gets you through the door with their managed services, meta components (like billing and IAM), and whatever else. Saying even in a tongue in cheek way that people are in love with paying more for less raw power isn’t giving people enough credit. I know I could get a better cost per hertz elsewhere, or whatever. That’s not the whole equation.

I'm not sure if cloud has a valid value-proposition. The more I explore and build the more irrelevant it seems for the average developer. Besides price and performance being obvious concerns, it's also a platform. Working with it fundamentally ties your business to a set of products. Historically, this hasn't worked well for Internet businesses. Plus, all the benefits of cloud can be mirrored by traditional servers.

Self-serve infrastructure appears likely to become increasingly viable as we continue improving last mile delivery and expand fiber access. Will cloud become self-cannibalizing? Definitely maybe.

That could have been true if the industry had not screwed up IPv6 and security so badly that it's actually rare for even good internet connections to expose their end users to full inbound internet traffic so it's actually harder to self host out of your basement today then it was 20 years ago because of the prevalence of ISP supplied hardware firewalls for todays consumer internet.

What cloud gets you is the ability to put your data/workload right at the core without having to make special deals with your local isp, and with a lot more resilience then you would likely afford unless your at least at the multiple 20 foot container full of servers scale of compute need.

https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/

https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections...

Edit: If anyone is interested in self-hosting, it's stupid simple with cloudflared. I have a 2017 Google Pixelbook running Ubuntu on custom firmware that's serving a Flask-based website. It sits on my desk charging while connected to a guest wifi network. It receives a 100/100 Mobile PageSpeed score and takes 0.8 seconds to fully load.