I admittedly haven't looked into this as in depth as I would like to, but I recall being surprised by Digital Ocean's "Droplets" (similar to Amazon EC2) being far cheaper[0]
I use AWS despite the (moderate, and with reserved instances largely nonexistent) premium on compute because of everything else that's right there.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
DigitalOcean does not have VPC; they've had a backplane of "private network IPs" isolated merely to all DigitalOcean customers. This month they instead changed their underlying system behavior (WTF) to isolate their private IPs to your account. So they also just broke that for their customers. On top of that--can you firewall/segment off that private network to certain machines? Nah. Can you talk to other customers' machines over this private network. Nah. It's a bad, partial solution for limited use cases.
AWS also has a managed solution for MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and MS SQL. DigitalOcean has an emoji shrug.
But I am not a "network specialist" and I've never even looked at AWS so there's bound to be lot I don't know in this arena.
I don't remember the last time I configured a compute-side firewall, whether in a cloud environment, a physical network environment, or in my home (my router does VLANs and allows rules between them).