Talisman12

You know that's not the point I made - I'm sure some individuals are on a VPS package, however there is a near 0 chance that customers opting for the cloud version as a cohort would be more technically able than self-hosting counterparts. Not denigrating anyone of course, but the technical skills needed to launch a cloud version of IPB are minimal, versus those inherently needed with self-hosting. This is demonstrably what IPS have said they are trying to eliminate with the cloud version in fact; lowering the bar to entry. You don't need to run your stack on a CSP to leverage their services such as the ones in question. Besides which configuring a firewall such as ufw behind an SG is redundant, NGFWs aside. There's really not though, given IPB would just be using the SDK to make calls to the appropriate services. In fact there's less setup than S3/CF because you aren't dealing with things like bucket policies. For example, for Comprehend you'd just use their "detect-sentiment" API call and you get the outputs Matt has likely been watching drop with each of my responses. What's more, IPS doesn't even have to teach people how to configure things if there was setup involved, since it'd just be a case of making a CFN template available - they're not going to be manually setting this up for each of their cloud version customers. Again, that's worst-case; as you say for self-hosted IPS leave the rest as an exercise for the reader, which is fine - They don't, not the account-related portions anyway. API calls sure, but then they do that for other integrations no problem. It's not more involved than any of the other integrations (sendgrid, S3, MaxMind, etc) are and really is simpler in most cases. No entitlement, just disappointed that IPS deem it beyond the capabilities of the self-hosting crowd to implement this at their own discretion, instead of forcing that decision upon them which ironically should be what differentiates their managed hosting (closed ecosystem, less choice) from self-hosting (greater flexibility, more effort needed).

So you agree that the self-hosters are likely the more technically minded? In which case it makes perfect sense that like-minded folk would use it. Your logic is flawed anyway, since IPS already offer S3 backends for self-hosted datastore; so don't imply that people wouldn't know how to configure it, since such configuration is already present. Besides, even if some people didn't know how to implement these things, it's far better to allow those who do the ability to instead of dumbing everything down, ironically only in the version that caters more to the people who would have the requisite knowledge.

Well that's a lie, it's hardly beyond most people's means to use an AWS Access and Secret key for the self-hosted client to talk with services such as Rekognition and Comprehend...