I’ve come to believe that such comparisons usually come from people who don’t understand the trade-offs of AWS in production.

Each project has certainly its own requirements. If you have the manpower and a backup plan with blue/green for every infrastructure component, then absolutely harness that cost margin of yours. If it’s at a break even when you factor in specialist continuity - training folks so nothing’s down if your hardware breaks, then AWS wins.

If your project can tolerate downtime and your SREs may sleep at night, then you might profit less from the several niners HA SLOs that AWS guarantees.

It’s very hard and costly to replicate what AWS gives you if you have requirements close to enterprise levels. Also, the usual argument goes - when you’re a startup you’ll be happy to trade CAPEX for OPEX.

For an average hobby project maybe not the best option.

As for latency, you can get just as good. Major exchanges run their matching engines in AWS DCs, you can co-locate.