You’re right but this isn’t tomato farming. This is writing software to automate certain actions and expose that automation as an api.

This is an attainable goal for just about any skilled software development team, and the analogy of a tomato farmer doesn’t really fit.

AWS has to provide a generalized solution to serve a wide range of customers and needs, while a company writing its own stuff needs only provide a solution for its own needs.

Damn near everything I do can be expressed as EC2, S3, and Lambda. And IAM.

Those are not challenging APIs to write in order to expose basic functionality and authentication, and such an API existing in my employer 10 years ago would have proven cheaper than AWS, especially for bandwidth; it’s all the manual steps and manual checks that needed to be done within my employer which drove us to AWS quickly.

We could definitely do EC2, S3, and Lambda cheaper than AWS charges us today.