VPC simply is what's there. Google's offerings in that regard are superior. Any SDN on private cloud would be be way, way better.

My forecasting on RDS is that it’s a dead-end product – all the future hotness is going to be in Aurora Serverless. Multi-region active/active Postgres with totally usage-based pricing and totally elastic performance is going to be a game-changer.

But if you need bleeding-edge Postgres performance, you hire a DBA, and they probably build something on EC2 or bare metal.

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As I understand it, RabbitMQ is probably a better point of comparison for SNS/SQS, and Kinesis is the Kafka peer.

Regardless, the reason you don’t “just” run Kafka is: you don’t have a team that knows how to tune, deploy, and operate a production Kafka cluster. I learned enough about SNS and SQS to get it running in an afternoon, and I really haven’t needed to think about it since. Kafka (or RabbitMQ, or ActiveMQ, or etc) need instrumentation and monitoring and patching and quorums and capacity planning and etc, and at some scale those are worthwhile, but that scale is MUCH larger than what most Kafka clusters are actually serving.

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The theme here is: if you have a business requirement for 90th percentile specialized performance, great! Hire domain specialists who can make your systems run at that tier! But for everyone else in the world, when you can get usage-based pricing, elastic resources, and automatic durability and patching... why would you go to the trouble of learning how to deploy and manage a service?