It is absolutely easier to use S3 than to create your own fast, highly available, infinitely scaling storage solution on your own metal. It requires more than zero knowledge / expertise to use S3, but far less than it would to implement and run yourself.
If you can accept that, then we already agree in principle. It's just matter of where the line is drawn for various services and use cases.
It’s hard to quantify how best you’ll be served but a lot of people are following the mantra of “nobody got fired for going AWS”.
It makes sense for some people, others are cargo-culting; yet more are fanning the flames of that cargo cult because their pay check depends on it.
Sysadmins are/were paid much less than cloud native devops people, and you need the same number of them unless you keep things very simple, which cloud providers do not incentivise. One need only look at AWS reference architectures.
I’ve worked at exactly one storage company that had a customer that had exascale data. They were doing cancer research as I recall and their test machines generated a lot of data. I heard stories about CERN at conferences but they also self host their data.
But those were outliers. All of the large and small enterprises outside of that could fit all of their “big data” in the memory of a single blade server and still have plenty to spare. You can get machines these days with many TB’s of RAM.
Try uploading 5PB of content and downloading it that day at 1M RPS.
Huge difference b/w reading a few pages of documentation on secrets manager, and clicking a button to get the service on vs deploying, and maintaining a vault on bare machines.
It's much easier to setup and forget basic bare metal servers with PG/NGINX and whatnot, than it is to automate using dozens of AWS services.
People pretend that AWS doesn't cost engineers to run it, when it's IMO basically the same human cost, if not bigger as complexity grows. You just don't pay that cost upfront, but you sure do pay it later with interest.
You get stuff like HA but that's not free. You also now have to manage a new boatload of services, scripts, changing APIs, etc.
