Same difference. Just because the huge amount of AWS work is distributed among other teams doesn't mean it's less work.

AWS in 2025 is way more work than Heroku/Fly/Vercel, but also more way work than renting bare metal from say Hetzner/OVH, and perhaps even more than renting colo.

This is only true if you're not using value added services. In my experience, teams that don't accelerate by adopting cloud won't use something like SQS or Fargate, they'll throw an MQ on a k8s cluster and get enraged when it doesn't work how they expected.

I literally right now have two customers I'm working to untangle from "value added" services because they've become a threat to the financial viability of their services vs. running their own alternatives.

AWS services are great quality, but they are extremely expensive.