It's a different form of lock-in since it's just his creation. When he leaves, all of this will be very hard to maintain and the company will probably rebuild it all on aws.

I have been bringing this up but they say that it's too late to change direction now (they are afraid to upset the guy).

But I'm looking on the bright side. I get to learn a lot of stuff I otherwise I wouldnt if this was a single managed aws service. I'm bringing in terraform and instead of just putting a message queue there, I need to spin up entire architectures to run his ec2 instances with all the apps and everything required to make things work.

Takes months... So for me it's fun. I don't have to pay for it. But companies are crazy. :)

Yeah great but what about when he dies and nobody else knows how it works? I've had to deal with that more than once (creator of Blackboard and creator of IP Office Contact Center, when they died so did the product)