Honestly, it really depends on which stage of life your company is at, and the resources you can allocate to infrastructure work.
At the very beginning of my company, we did exactly what you mentioned here.
- Pay for a managed NAT gateway? No thanks I can do the NAT myself with iptables on a cheaper EC2 instance.
- Pay for a managed NFS? No thanks I can do it myself
- Pay for managed VPN? No thanks I can setup IPsec myself
- etc.
With time though, as the company starts to gain money, and the number of users increase, we switched back to more managed services. The key here is that you want to refocus your infrastructures efforts on more business centric issues.
Also, most of the time, the time spent to maintain a service is exponential with its scaling. NFS is a good example here. Setting up a number of NFS shares for 5/10 users is fine. Once you get 20+ NFS users, you just better focus on your real company product rather spend month and money on maintaining NFS yourself.
A small company in an EM country, I don't think infra spend will ever come close to those in the US to being within the budget without significantly affecting margins… and considering that a lot of companies in the US are funded with either massive amounts of debt and on E rounds of funding… I don't think most can afford it either…
Though saying this, even at a small corp level, are still affordable proprietary solutions out there (not necessarily in AWS), but most people trend towards whats trendy…
Honestly, it really depends on which stage of life your company is at, and the resources you can allocate to infrastructure work.
At the very beginning of my company, we did exactly what you mentioned here.
- Pay for a managed NAT gateway? No thanks I can do the NAT myself with iptables on a cheaper EC2 instance.
- Pay for a managed NFS? No thanks I can do it myself
- Pay for managed VPN? No thanks I can setup IPsec myself
- etc.
With time though, as the company starts to gain money, and the number of users increase, we switched back to more managed services. The key here is that you want to refocus your infrastructures efforts on more business centric issues.
Also, most of the time, the time spent to maintain a service is exponential with its scaling. NFS is a good example here. Setting up a number of NFS shares for 5/10 users is fine. Once you get 20+ NFS users, you just better focus on your real company product rather spend month and money on maintaining NFS yourself.