Sure, that happens. If you can save millions of dollars a month and move your business from non-viable to viable, I think it's a good tradeoff. That's what I do for a living, so I see value in it. Not everyone should have to deal with it though.

Also, AWS is not problem free. When low level issues (like a firmware problem) strike, which they sometimes will, you often cannot identify or fix the issue yourself. AWS instances still run on that same shitty hardware, and while your odds are better that Amazon figured out most of the issues before you encountered them, your odds are also worse that they tested your particular special use case.

So you can wind up playing the 'debug by support ticket' game. Check everything on your end. Check your deployment times for correlations to the problem. Finally give up and reach out to AWS support. Insist that the issue isn't on your end. Find out that the issue can't be resolved until their deployment next week. It's all understandable given the scope of what Amazon is doing, but they will never be as incentivized as you are to solve your problem.