I say this as an engineer who has a ton of relational DB experience. Before cloud providers w/DB options were so plentiful devs/engineers/sysadmins would have to set this up by hand.
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> If you had no knowledge on standing up a DB server
My point is, "but yea what if you do?" There's actual value in that I've found, especially when I'm looking to save pennies at the early-stage of a startup while in the customer aq phase. Many folks have expertise in those areas without needing a cloud provider.
I do get the "but all of these things!" argument (access control, patches, updates, monitoring, logging) but often those are easily solved/solvable problems even without leveraging cloud offerings. I can get very far along with an ELK/TIG stack + uptime robot and basic VPS networking features... all for a very affordable monthly bill on the infra.
If you or any of your developers don't know how to do that, you/they should seriously seriously spend the 40 minutes it takes to learn.
It’s not hard to imagine a dev being brought up 5 years ago into a React world, with JS in the backend and something like Vercel or Netlify to deploy their app.
Someone like that might be entirely uncomfortable when dumped into a plain old Linux server, and would definitely take longer than 40 minutes to even get their head wrapped around what’s going on.
That’s not a knock on them - they get their job done, and to the business that’s all that matters. But yeah, just trying to, I don’t even know, empathise? Try to understand? Who knows. It’s just a different world now.
If a grown up person (who is presumably making a good money in their React/JS thing) can't figure on how to install a web server in 40 minutes (with all SO, Google and a bazillion of articles on how to do so) then...
Like come on, twenty years ago you still needed to get your ass off the chair and go to the bookstore, find and buy a proper book and actually read it. Now you just need to type "Ubuntu 20 install webserver" in to the search and voila.