I started with AWS pretty early.

Networking was drop dead simple. Basically I think all my instances got an 10.x.x.x IP address. You had a basic firewall (security groups nowadays) but that was it.

Let's say you had another account for a separate project or a client with another account.

You could literally connect to their instance via private IP.

All your own resources and all theirs were in this same 10.x.x.x address space which seemed to be globally reachable inside AWS.

The layers of config to go across account now between different orgs is wild by comparison.

The number of instance types alone for RDS is ... around 200? Then there's storage types, IOPS, multi-zone, etc. All of that without any price estimate. Which is by design, of course.

Digital Ocean will give you the cost as you configure the options. Complete transparency. This is how it SHOULD be.

Cost obfuscation is an AWS feature. I was afraid to spin up the smallest instance because I didn't want to find out it was going to cost me over $100 at the end of the billing cycle.