It’s not really a different argument

The suggestion was to replace DBB and S3 with some VMs. Presumably those VMs would be managed by the engineers part of the parent commenter’s organization. They do not have access to as many engineers as AWS, nor do they pay them as well.

Not arguing about cost effectiveness here. Just pointing out how silly it is to suggest that you can replace DDB/S3 with some VMs ran by a midsize organization