> people push AWS setups not because it's the best thing - it can be if you're not cost sensitive
This is so weird to me, because if you're running a company, you should be cost-sensitive. Sure, you might be willing to spend extra money on AWS in the very beginning if it helps you get to market faster. But after that, there's really no excuse: profit margin should be a very important consideration in how you run your infrastructure.
Of course, if you're VC backed, maybe that doesn't matter... that kind of company seems to mainly care about user growth, regardless of how much money is being sent to the incinerator to get it.
I was checking the appetite for some cost reduction service a while back and one of the responses I got was from a CTO telling me he didn't need to care about cost because they'd just gotten funded and had lots of cash in the bank.
It's perfectly valid to not want to put engineering effort into it at the "wrong time" when delivering features will give you a higher return, but it came across as a lack of interest in paying attention to cost at all.
I saw a lot of that attitude from the tech side when I was looking at this. A lot of the time the CFO or CEO would be appallled, because they were actually paying attention to burn rates, but where often getting stonewalled by the tech side who'd often just insist all the costs were necessary - even while they often didn't know what they were spending or on what.