The bulk of the article was based around ElasticSearch, which is one of their more awkward-feeling services (for instance, locking down by IP address takes several minutes to deploy, whereas the rest of their services are configurable via security groups in seconds)
I don't think the AWS story has been protecting you from devops, but rather, protecting you from infrastructure.
As a customer, I pay one bill. If you look at the pricing of services that are just value adds atop EC2 (like ElasticSearch and ElastiCache) it seems that AWS seems they are comparably mature.
I don't think the AWS story has been protecting you from devops, but rather, protecting you from infrastructure.