You are paying aws to not have one big server, so you get high availability and dynamic load balancing as instances come and go.

I agree its not cheaper than being on prem. But it’s much higher quality solutions.

Today at work, they decided to upgrade from ancient Ubuntu version to a more recent version. Since they don’t use aws properly, they treat servers as pets. So to upgrade Ubuntu, they actually upgraded Ubuntu on the instance instead of creating a new one. This led to grub failing and now they are troubleshooting how to mount disks etc.

All of this could easily be avoided by using the cloud properly.