E.g. you can have a nice app running with elastic beanstalk, file storage on S3, database on RDS, full text search on CloudSearch, without worrying once about apt/yum, incompatible JVM versions, backups, stuff in /etc or setting up iptables and ssh, which is what most people think of as sysadmin work.

Bad idea. Extraordinarily bad idea. Of course, I'll gladly charge you $450 an hour to recover your data when you accidentally drop a production table. It's part of how I make a living.

> setting up iptables

i.e. setting up security groups - same solution, better gui. Someone still needs to understand what it's doing.

Elastic Beanstalk... sounds cool, but based on the "let you take over management when you're ready", it's still a EC2 instance under the hood that's just configured for you. Scale at all, and you're probably going to have to start concerning yourself with all those bits you've been able to ignore until then.

AWS' automated offerings are good, but if you're doing anything at scale, they're frequently not good enough. And my experience has shown me that the line is really really painful to cross when you get to it with a fully staffed team, let alone a sole developer.

> i.e. setting up security groups - same solution, better gui. Someone still needs to understand what it's doing.

Yes, but like being able to install wordpress doesn't mean you know how to program, setting up beanstalk+rds is not on the same level of expertise as setting up N machines from the ground up. When I start an RDS/CloudSearch/DynamoDB instance the security groups are already setup in a sensible way.

Sure, there are plenty of cases in which what AWS offers is not good enough. Heck having an ops team is always better than not having it.

But I replied to AWS only getting rid of "someone who can physically access the box". That seems reductive.