It all depends what you are doing. If you just want to run simple webservers then it's certainly lower maintenance than having a fleet of named/Simpson servers to run them.
The trouble is you then start doing more. You start going way beyond what you were doing before. Like you ditch RDS and just run your DBs in cluster. You stop checking your pipelines manually because you implement auto-scaling etc.
It's not free, nobody ever said it was, but could you do all the stuff you mentioned on another system with a lower maintenance burden? I doubt it.
What it boils down to is running services has maintenance still, but it's hopefully lower than before and much of the burden is amortized across many services.
But you definitely need to keep an eye on things. Don't implement auto-scaling unless you're spending a lot of your time manually scaling. Otherwise you've now got something new to maintain without any payoff.
The trouble is you then start doing more. You start going way beyond what you were doing before. Like you ditch RDS and just run your DBs in cluster. You stop checking your pipelines manually because you implement auto-scaling etc.
It's not free, nobody ever said it was, but could you do all the stuff you mentioned on another system with a lower maintenance burden? I doubt it.
What it boils down to is running services has maintenance still, but it's hopefully lower than before and much of the burden is amortized across many services.
But you definitely need to keep an eye on things. Don't implement auto-scaling unless you're spending a lot of your time manually scaling. Otherwise you've now got something new to maintain without any payoff.