The biggest benefit to me as a developer at least in larger organizations that AWS gives is ownership of my stack and needs. I don’t need to file a purchase request for new servers to spin something up or deploy a new application. I don’t need to fight with other departments for the fixed CPU and memory capacities in our virtualization system.

But everything else would be so much simpler and better for most of the things I do if it could just be a normal box with normal software.

In theory I could build that experience with nothing but bare EC2 instances. But once you’re in AWS, they make using their managed things so tempting that convincing everyone else to not use them is an even bigger battle.