Yeah. My AWS experience is on small-scale deployments--up to a few dozen servers. It's painful to manage them through the Amazon UI. When I left that client, the devops team there was transitioning to TerraForm and other deployment and configuration systems, and connecting to in-house monitoring systems. That's the right approach. It's out of reach for smaller teams who can't afford the extra engineering; they're better off with something like Digital Ocean. DO has a fantastic UI and a decent API, but doesn't support anywhere near the level of enterprise features that AWS does.
