> If I was ever at a high level in a company I'd never go farther than some AWS load balancing or whatever on cloud instances we still have root on.
Your competitors would salivate at this statement, fyi. Speed is a competitive advantage. AWS is not "let's rent a big ball of EC2 servers and call it a day", and anyone who treats it like that is going to get eaten alive. If you have not looked at -- for example -- Dynamo, you should. If you have not looked at SQS, you should. The ability to have predictable, scalable services for your engineers to use and deploy against is like dumping kerosene onto a fire, it unlocks abilities and velocity that more traditional software dev shops just can't compete against.