Comment by willthames

RDS is an example of something that is more expensive but can be better value - because a lot of the managed service stuff saves the time of those looking after it.

15 years ago I worked an infrastructure department with 50+ employees - these days a lot of that work that we used to do back then is taken care of by AWS.

Scaling the infra to meet peak capacity (which might be two days in a year) because you can only run on hardware you have, having data centres and data centre engineers, are all costs that go away with cloud, even though you are paying more for the compute you do use.