Managing a complex environment is hard, no matter whether that’s deployed on AWS or on prem. You always need skilled workers. On one platform you need k8s experts. On the other platform you need AWS experts. Let’s not pretend like AWS is a simple one-click fire and forget solution.
And let’s be very real here: if your cloud service goes down for a few hours because you screwed something up, or because AWS deployed some bad DNS rules again, the world moves on. At the end of the day, nobody gives a shit.
Maybe I've drank the koolaid but I've done both a lot of systems level work and AWS work (I don't actually use any AWS stuff in my role here interestingly) and I think for a business that needs a handful of hosts in 2 AZs I can't imagine the ROI and risk profile being better to self host.
AWS truly does let you focus on your business logic and abstracts a TON of undifferentiated work and well beyond the low hanging fruit of system updates and load balancing.
I guess put another way, providing a SaaS you need to have an SLA, those SLAs flow from SLO and SLIs and ultimately a risk profile of your hw and sw. The risk of a bad HBA alone probably means a day of downtime if you don't do things perfectly. AWS has bad HBAs, CPUs, memory, disks etc all day long every day and it's not even a blip for customers, never mind downtime. And if you don't model bad HBAs in your SLAs then your board is going to be pissed when that outage inevitably happens.
Now if you don't have SLAs and you like sysops, networkops, clusterops, dbops work then sure, YOLO.
I'm wondering if changes to tax and accounting rules for CapEx is what really sent companies to the cloud. I do know that a lot of VC-backed companies don't want to own anything physical because that's a problem to be solved by the company that acquires them a few years down the road.