> as well as the overhead of managing servers and container clusters which is a lot more costly than you might think

A lot of people underestimate that in my experience; I see a lot of people who find it cool setting them up (also, a large amount are not doing this scripted but via the web interface). My current case has a myriad of VPC, container clusters, load balancers, clusters, auto scaling etc and it looks really impressive but it's very costly and their dev (who was also devops) disappeared as he buckled under the stress. Also, none of that is needed in this case (not saying there are not many cases it is needed!).

Anyway I will experiment more with Lambda; I think I'm tainted by the very costly abuse cases I had to move to normal linux environments to make affordable for the startup.

But to be fair, for most projects the complexity that Amazon's services carry with them is absolutely not justified. Sure I can learn to work with 10-20 Amazon services but even me as a senior guy who knows his way around pretty much anything you throw at him, that's precious time spent not helping the direct business needs but basically making sure the house won't collapse.

And a lot of smaller companies like to merge the "programmer" and "DevOps" titles into one person because of course, that means one paycheck and not two. And as you said, they get angry that you can't become a pro sysadmin in an afternoon.

I suppose I am just trying to say yet again that many companies reach for BigCorp tools when they really ought to be fine with 2-3 DigitalOcean droplets and 1 dedicated DB droplet, plus 1 extra for backups.