No you don’t need to understand your infra from the ground up - especially as a solo founder. You should offload as much of the grunt work as you can afford to so you can concentrate on your business domain.
If something “goes wrong” or you don’t understand how to implement something with managed services, support is just a ticket and a live chat/phone call away. I can speak from personal experience that AWS business support is great even when there isn’t a problem and you just want an “easy button” for someone to tell you what’s wrong with your configuration.
It depends on the service I think. I've had ECS errors that took AWS support days to figure out (turns out some permission quota thing was overriding some ECS thing).
All in all, I think maybe I might have to find some other batch processing system.
If you are using regular ECS with EC2 - as opposed to Fargate, it just provisions regular EC2 instance with an agent already installed. You can ssh/rdp into the instance and troubleshoot it.
But yeah I did have a doozy of an issue with ECS but it was completely my fault. I create a cross account policy for ECR but left out the account that actually contained the registry. Then my containers were in a private subnet without any access to the internet (by design they were behind a load balancer) but they couldn’t get to the ECR endpoint. I just had to either assign a public IP address or use a private link.
If something “goes wrong” or you don’t understand how to implement something with managed services, support is just a ticket and a live chat/phone call away. I can speak from personal experience that AWS business support is great even when there isn’t a problem and you just want an “easy button” for someone to tell you what’s wrong with your configuration.