Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

This article is written in kind of a controversial way but it seems like the throughline of the argument is something like &quot;use heroku until you have 100k users&quot;.<p>This seems very reasonable to me. I thought it was going to be a pitch for on prem, which is also fine for certain scales.<p>I think generally the scaling steps from startup to megacorp go:<p>Heroku&#x2F;Dokku &gt; Public Cloud &gt;Dedicated servers in someone else&#x27;s DC &gt; Custom Hardware in custom built data centers.<p>Each makes sense at each scale. I find it to be more of a right tool for the job consideration than one being better than the other.<p>With modern cloud tooling your infra can also look more or less logically the same once you grow past the heroku level.

&gt; If you&#x27;re an indie hacker, a boostrapper, a startup, an agency or a consultancy, or just a small team building a product, chances are you are not going to need the cost and complexity that comes with modern cloud platforms.<p>Hard disagree.<p>- On cost: there is almost nothing better for the indie hacker, bootstrapper, or startup than cloud services.<p>I run apps on all three platforms (Google, AWS, and Azure) and my monthly spend is less than $2.00 &lt; month using a mix of free tier services and consumption based services (Google Cloud Run, Google Firestore, AWS CloudFront, AWS S3, Azure Functions, Azure CosmosDB).<p>- On complexity: if you&#x27;ve used Google Cloud Run or Azure Container Apps, you know how easy it is to run workloads in the cloud. Exceedingly easy. I can go from code on my machine to running API in the cloud that can scale from 0 - 1000 instances in under 5 minutes just by slapping in a Dockerfile _with no special architecture or consideration, no knowledge of platform specific CLIs, no knowledge of Terraform&#x2F;Pulumi&#x2F;etc._<p>The current generation of container-based serverless runtimes (Google Cloud Run, Azure Container Apps) is pretty much AMAZING for indie hackers; use whatever framework you want, use middleware, use whatever language you want. As long as you can copy&#x2F;paste an app runtime specific Dockerfile (e.g. Node.js, dotnet, Go, Python, etc.) in there, you can run it in the cloud, and run it virtually for free until you actually get traffic.<p>If any of the projects take off, then pay to scale. If they don&#x27;t take off, you&#x27;ve spent pennies. Some months I can&#x27;t even believe they charge my CC for $0.02.

&gt; - Terraform to create the API gateway, database, lambdas, queues, Route 53 records: 1 week<p>- Terraform to create the IAM policies: 4 weeks<p>Perhaps it&#x27;s because I am very familiar with the aforementioned tool and cloud but 5 weeks for writing those resources gives me the impresion of:<p>1. Lack of experience on AWS.<p>2. Lack of experience with Terraform.<p>3. Both.<p>I don&#x27;t want to sound arrogant by any means but a Terraform project for something like that, documented, with its CI and applying changes via CD, would take me 4 days being generous.

ITT: people who spent many hours learning proprietary (often unnecessarily complex) cloud platforms trying to convince others (and themselves) that it was the best use of their limited time alive.<p>Stockholm syndrome à la Big Cloud.<p>It&#x27;s okay to be interested in elaborate cloud architecture things and learn them because of that, but don&#x27;t sell it as one-size-fits-all thing that every little company needs.<p>Most companies don&#x27;t need that complexity, but of course, Big Cloud with their billions needs to convince you otherwise.

I don&#x27;t know. Maybe I&#x27;m in a bubble, but it seems to me that knowing the basics of AWS (or some cloud provider) has become part of the standard developer&#x27;s toolkit. With AWS specifically, there&#x27;s so much documentation out there about getting started that I think you can have something up in a day or two on something like ECS or lambda (using something like the Serverless framework). And then when you need the more complex functionality, you are already in the AWS ecosystem.<p>If you are a startup trying to get a product to market, AWS is typically going to be a very small cost unless you are doing something very compute intensive (in which case something like Heroku, which the author recommends, certainly won&#x27;t be cheaper anyway). The high bills only come later, if ever, after you&#x27;ve decided to create 20 databases and 50 apps for your 70 person startup.

This is just another way of saying “you shouldn’t use AWS if you don’t know how to use it”<p>Yes, there’s a steep learning curve. But once you’re passed that (or if you gained that knowledge in a prior role) AWS can easily hands down be the easiest, cheapest, and fastest infrastructure platform to use.<p>…if you know what you’re doing.<p>If you don’t know the ins and outs of AWS, then yes, you probably shouldn’t use it for your next MVP or startup idea.

&gt; API that works on localhost: 4 days<p>Lol. This may be true but if kind of pointless as an api on localist isn’t very useful unless you’re automating your home. Of course it’s easier to hack something out on localhost than to design for actual users.<p>I think it makes more sense to build incrementally with the end in mind. So writing those terraform scripts will take less time if you initially write them to deploy to localhost for testing.

I&#x27;ve been able to get a lot done with API Gateway, Lambda, S3, RDS, SQS, Lex, and ElasticSearch. I work for a Fortune 200 company who&#x27;s risk averse and views &quot;the cloud&quot; with suspicion. My team&#x27;s ability to get so much done is starting to change that perception.<p>Sure, if you&#x27;re in a startup and you&#x27;re doing most of the infrastructure and operational work yourself then working on-premise is often advantageous. If, like me, you&#x27;re working for a Fortune 200 company and it takes multiple ServiceNow tickets to get on-prem hardware, a lead time of several months to get it through procurement and subsequently racked and stacked, and working with infrastructure solution engineers throughout the process - trust me, AWS is a <i>much better</i> choice and will enable your team to get stuff done.<p>If you <i>are</i> working for a startup then beware, as you grow avoid the temptation to build a data center - go to the public cloud. I would argue since that&#x27;s where you&#x27;re going to be hosted anyway - assuming your successful growth - then you should really consider just starting out there in the first place.

I use AWS all the time and for startups I 100% agree with this. Sure, I could get a cool stack up and running in AWS much faster than this article, but the infrastructure by its self delivers ZERO value even if it’s shiny and fun to work on. We must remember this.<p>Start on Heroku, maybe with your own RDS. This removes so many decisions and ongoing overhead and lets you focus on building the thing that actually delivers value.

Two points (worked at AWS for 5 years and then left to start a company, which runs on AWS)<p>- Yes, if you don’t have AWS, Azure or GCP experience it can be hard. Harder than it should be. But this is why I try to make things simple. Run node &#x2F; express in lambda. Use managed services. Use CDK so the IaC abstraction is easier. Definitely not 4 weeks for the IAM policies.<p>- You get tons of credits as a VC backed startup (in all providers) so cost is not that much of an initial issue<p>- Yes you need to pay attention on the expenses, setup budgets and budget alarms, and run cost optimizers often

&gt; It costs how much?!<p>The author&#x27;s not wrong. Cost comes with lack of accountability in my experience. In turn, my devsecops dept (~20 people) has kept costs down by holding monthly AWS accountability meetings. &quot;Who owns this and why does it exist?&quot; is the leading question.<p>&gt; The all-you-can-eat buffet problem<p>Valid point. But I&#x27;ve gotten far in my career by specializing in AWS. It&#x27;s not going anywhere soon. It&#x27;s the one cloud provider I would say you should go all-in on. Azure maybe next. GCP? Come on. Conversely, I just got an email from Heroku saying they&#x27;re retiring one of my free-tier databases that I still use.<p>&gt; Culture of simplicity eats strategy of complexity for breakfast<p>Orgs, please retire this saying. I hear this everywhere. It&#x27;s lost a lot of meaning. Just spell out what your org does better than the rest of the pack.

Don&#x27;t use AWS, GCP or Azure. Use Digital Ocean and the likes. Cheap VM compute, managed databases. And for the most effective setup, just get an affordable VM and chuck <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dokku.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dokku.com&#x2F;</a> onto it. Boom you have your self hosted Heroku. Cheap bandwidth, opportunity to scale.<p>AWS is a fools errand at the startup level unless you need some of their specialised services. Stick to &quot;tier 2&quot; cloud providers like Digital Ocean or Linode. If all you need is servers, database and storage, then don&#x27;t waste your money on the major cloud providers. They are the wrong choice for basic compute.

&gt; Terraform to create the IAM policies: 4 weeks<p>In Netflix more than 10 years ago, it&#x27;s more like this: a single engineer builds a deployment&#x2F;management tool: 1 - 2 months. Every other engineer creates a new and fully configured cluster: minutes.<p>Seriously, can we please get over the fetish of using anything this DSL that YAML or whatever &quot;specification language&quot;? Such tools are powerful, flexible, but should not have a place for engineers who just want to provision resources. The tools violate almost every UX principles, in particular the following:<p>- Discoverability. Very little. One has to read tons of docs and SO posts to figure out what needs to be done. You want to pass in some environment variables? A typical answer from those who use Nomad&#x2F;TFE: easy, just pass in this 200 lines of Jinja template. Really? Really? You call this ease of freaking use?<p>- Affordance. None.<p>- Constraints. If you call the errors only after you submit your 1000-line yaml scripts.<p>- Consistency. Maybe, but still, embedding a Jinja template to pass in variable is an insult to UX.<p>It&#x27;s a unrepentable sin to ask me to learn your shit.

As an solopreneur running a SaaS and various apps&#x2F;addons on other SaaSes on AWS for 7 years now, I&#x27;m inclined to agree.<p>In fact, I&#x27;ve already migrated a fair chunk of my workload off AWS Lambda onto constantly running fly.io VMs.<p>It&#x27;s significantly cheaper than serverless (when you&#x27;re past the free tier), the servers just restart if they crash (as opposed to running up a six figure AWS bill), and it&#x27;s less complicated operationally (it&#x27;s just a VM, less need to pipe messages with SQS, figure out IAM, etc)

I work for AWS and I get paid decent money to work with companies and help them become “cloud native”. My specialty is “application modernization” and I avoid “lift and shift” projects like the plague. Even though I realize that doing lift and shifts first is the right answer sometimes. I think I can confidently state that I know AWS pretty well.<p>That being said, in my personal life if someone ever came to me and said that they were starting a project from scratch or even if I were starting a hobby project from scratch where I saw Lambda + DynamoDB wasn’t the right answer, I would just use Lightsail and simple monolithic application using whatever frameworks are appropriate that I already knew.<p>AWS Lightsail is a simple fixed priced VPS. I’m not advocating using Lightsail over another VPS provider. It would just be my preference because I know how to transition to full fledged AWS later.

&gt;Let&#x27;s face it, choosing AWS is the cloud computing version of &quot;nobody ever got fired for buying IBM&quot;. There is perceived safety in choosing a popular offering — it&#x27;s what everybody else does.<p>This is the only line that actually matters. Are there better and cheaper options for your organization? Almost certainly, but no one ever got fired for picking AWS.

Article doesn’t really present an argument. Pretty much starts with ‘you don’t want the cost and complexity’ and then goes on from that point as a given.<p>A more useful article would actually walk through the cost&#x2F;complexity trade

I don&#x27;t understand. Then I won&#x27;t be able to put Kubernetes, Microservices and AWS on my CV.

One thing I have been wrong about for about 2 years is predicting companies would pull back from using the cloud. What I see in corporate AWS accounts is a lot of waste. I thought once companies started tightening spending they would look at their cloud spending and shut a bunch of it down. When an EC2 instance only costs $30 a month to leave running, it&#x27;s easy to forget about it. You get enough of those across a corporate enterprise and you are talking about serious money.

To start working, you need a VPS instance, a Postgres, and a backup scheme.<p>If that&#x27;s starting to be not enough, then consider yourself lucky, and start scaling.<p>&quot;Premature scaling is a root of all evil&quot; (and a good source of profit for Amazon, but I am repeating myself).

I am currently in the middle of setting up AWS and that decision graph made me chuckle because it resonates quite deeply.<p>I need to do GPU inference but I don&#x27;t want to run the machine 24x7. I may use it for about 4 hours per day at best. Lambda doesn&#x27;t offer GPUs and neither does ECS+Fargate.<p>It seems like I could setup an endpoint using Sagemaker and then destroy it when no longer needed, and automate all of this but it feels quite messy.<p>The other route is perhaps I can launch an instance every day with ECS and then get rid of it.<p>All these routes seem quite inefficient. There seems to be something called Elastic inference where I can provision the right amount of GPU resources - but it seems like I&#x27;ll need a spare EC2 instance to do that if I&#x27;m not mistaken, which is not ideal either.<p>I guess all this stems from the fact that there is no straightforward virtualization for GPU workloads and so they have to provision them 1:1 which currently they are not equipped to do.<p>Has anyone run into a similar problem and found a more elegant solution? All of the above are very messy. Is there some obvious choice I am missing?

&gt; Unless you hire a good (read: expensive) devops person to look after your infrastructure, clickops-ing your way through the AWS console will likely leave behind a pile of unused instances and components that will eat into your budget.<p>While this is true-ish (finding lost resources or just not creating them in the first place is not that complex), when the day comes that you will need&#x2F;want to move to one of the cloud providers you will need a good devops to handle that hybrid cloud environment and making the transfer as painless as possible. cross cloud routing, DB migrations and not to mention setting up secure access for all of it is less complex in my POV then cost managing your cloud account

I think AWS is shooting themselves in the foot with their ridiculous EKS offering. The fact that it is necessary to first download a 3rd party tool (eksctl) to get anything working is insane. Then, getting basic things working like connecting a load balancer involves importing all kinds of random policies and configuration (which does who knows what) from random github repositories is perhaps even more ridiculous. The same thing in GCP takes nearly zero effort.<p>I can understand why AWS would try to steer people away from Kubernetes since it has a commoditizing effect. However, it could end up steering people away from AWS entirely.

A whole lot of nothing being said. Use the right tool for the right job.<p>If you&#x27;re familiar with AWS, use it and get running and focus on delivering product instead of fine-tuning all the settings and worrying about the perfect cloud environment.<p>My honest opinion, using some third party tools&#x2F;services on top of AWS only creates tech debt. Over the last two years, AWS has improved a lot of their tools to be incredibly easy that any developer can use it. Developers should be able to understand how their applications run in the cloud provider as well.

this &quot;thought leadership&quot; in our industry is a disease

Small companies and startups can get pretty far with 1 dedicated server and good backups...

These shock jock articles are boring.<p>Step 1: Write an incendiary title Step 2: Make definitive statements meant to be applied broadly but actually targeted at a specific situation that the author is experiencing, or comes from the author&#x27;s own problems with something. Step 3: Make sure to cast doubt and insecurity, making somebody else feel like they made the wrong choice, even when everything is working perfectly Step 4: Street cred improved!

Holy oversimplification, Batman.<p>If you hire people who don&#x27;t know how the cloud works, then of course their time will be sucked up by learning how it works. If you hire people who know how the cloud works, it is a productivity multiplier. Use the tools that you know.<p>BUT. If you have to build a giant wooden sailing ship, and all you know how to use is a Swiss army knife... and you want to get that ship done this century..... you need to learn new tools.

I generally agree that no one that isnt a professional devops person (or has spent months tuning IAM and route53 policies) should be using AWS. That said, GCP is so much easier to use and easily usable by a novice because it has a lot of good defaults.<p>Compute and egress costs can be prohibitive at scale, but features like storage + bigquery (OLAP SQL db where u only pay for queries) are basically free for low-to-moderate volume workloads.

Disclaimer: not a backend or web engineer, I mostly write embedded software, but inevitably need to implement services from time to time (and had a startup at one point)<p>My response is &quot;yes but what about databases&quot;. There are any number of ways of hosting my application - &quot;put it on a VM&quot; is a perfectly reasonable approach, particularly as my preferred platform is Elixir which is pretty monolithic anyway. That&#x27;s fine for the app, but what about the DB? I think I know just enough to know that hosting Postgres properly (i.e. reliably and performantly with appropriate backups) is not that easy, and I&#x27;d like someone else to do it for me.<p>For my startup I used App Engine (Flexible Environment) and Cloud SQL. That worked well in that I had the &quot;two instances behind a load balancer&quot; that you want for seamless upgrade, and managed SQL without having to delve into all the many Google Cloud services for networking etc. etc. Everything else was just &#x27;more elixir&#x27; which is easy to test locally.

This might be true if you’ve never used AWS before. But if you know AWS it doesn’t take anywhere near that long.<p>I’m building a PBBG and have it on AWS. Built the site in .NET with SignalR, MartenDB&#x2F;PostgreSQL. Needed to host it.<p>2 evenings to write a cloudformation script which builds a VPC. Public and private subnets. RDS. A tiny instance to act as a nat gateway (for servers in private subnet). A small server with HAProxy for load balancer. A tiny server for redis. 2 web servers. Plus some sh scripts to build the project. Zip. Ssh jump to the server and deploy. Total cost is like $42&#x2F;m.<p>Used a tiny instance for nat gateway cos aws nat gateway costs $32+ingress. Used tiny instance for redis as it’s only used for signalr connections across servers and services. Tiny instance for HAProxy cos aws application load balancer is $15&#x2F;m. I could consolidate 3 of the servers into 1 but I choose not to.<p>You can build flexible things on AWS. The problem with AWS is it’s very easy to just spin up random stuff and not care about cost and blow out a budget quickly.

If you are a starting out, you don&#x27;t have to use terraform, use the console. Nothing stops you from using the managed services in a heroku box either. Need a queue for your API Heroku-&gt;SQS. Need storage, Heroku-&gt;S3. The industry always talks about best practices but rarely mentions maturity models which this article gets close to brining up but stops short.

Couple with &quot;you should not be using Kubernetes, probably&quot; and &quot;you should be writing a monolith, probably&quot;.

So what, the suggestion is to go with Heroku instead?<p>I think fargate + docker is super easy to setup, run and maintain. Maybe Heroku makes it a little bit easier, but that&#x27;s about it. Once you leave the Heroku ecosystem you&#x27;ll have lost all the time you saved.<p>I&#x27;m not convinced.

TLDR - Author seems to value simplicity &amp; focusing on value for users. Doesn&#x27;t like AWS&#x2F;Google&#x2F;etc. because they have to many advanced features. Suggests using Heroku instead.<p>The first part I think most anyone would agree with.<p>The 2nd part doesn&#x27;t make sense. AWS&#x2F;Google etc all have simple ways to setup a web app &amp; database without messing with containers, microservices, event architecture etc.<p>As for cost, they all offer generous free tiers for learning &amp; hobby projects.<p>If you want to make a business out of it, check out their also very generous programs for startups with over $100,000 of free services. Azure is over $150k.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;activate&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;activate&#x2F;</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;startups?rtc=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;startups?rtc=1</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inthecloud.withgoogle.com&#x2F;startup&#x2F;dl-cd.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inthecloud.withgoogle.com&#x2F;startup&#x2F;dl-cd.html</a><p>Digital Ocean, Cloudflare and many others also offer great incentives to get you to build on their platform for cheap or free in hopes that you succeed &amp; stay with them.

Always remember, HN itself runs on a single dedicated server from a fairly small provider (m5hosting.com). IIUC, they have a backup server. But still, if it&#x27;s good enough for HN, it&#x27;s good enough for lots of us.

AWS is many things.<p>Their CloudFront service is pretty awesome.<p>You just put it between your server and your users and BOOM all your static content gets delivered lightning fast via Amazons world wide CDN.<p>And it costs like $10 per month millions of requests.

- Time it took to learn the skills to write a scalable service that can handle 100K events per second: 3 years<p>- Time it took to write that API on localhost: 4 days<p>- Time it took to learn Terraform and some AWS services, to create the API gateway, database, lambdas, queues, Route 53 records: 1 week<p>- Time it took to learn AWS IAM policies to create the IAM policies in Terraform: 4 weeks<p>Author conveniently left out a few bits of information. Once you learn IAM and Terraform, I&#x27;m doubtful it takes you another 4 weeks to setup the policies for a new project.

There is a middle way, just set your boundaries on which AWS services you want to use. 1 x EC2 server + 1 x application load balancer and a few S3 buckets works well for my hobby projects (ALB is just for multiple domain SSL and reverse proxy). You can run docker on the EC2 and deploy containers. Yes there is a small amount of setting things up in the AWS UI and some bash scripting for deployment, but then you&#x27;d have to configure your DNS and firewall somewhere with a VPS anyway.

This article has so many gems...<p>&gt; Using the shiniest new technologies is rarely the cause for success, it&#x27;s usually the result<p>&gt; Culture of simplicity eats strategy of complexity for breakfast

Why do you need IAM policies <i>at all</i> to run a service that works on localhost on AWS? I would expect that you need IAM policies if your app integrates with the AWS platform, which it definitely wasn&#x27;t doing on localhost, or if you are running multiple services in the same account and want to lock them down (e.g. not have services access each other&#x27;s S3 buckets and such).

AWS is very good and cheap once you know how to use it and what parts. The alternatives most likely run on top of AWS anyhow. I use terranix <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terranix.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terranix.org&#x2F;</a> instead of straight terraform. I can compile, package, deploy everything just with nix.

These kind of blog posts treat this as a technical problem instead of a business problem.<p>Until you get some unicorn that says &quot;we are profitable at price $X and all of our competitors are losing money at $X + $Y, and it&#x27;s because of our software architecture and infrastructure choices&quot;, nobody is going to be convinced.

&gt; And often it is so alluring that actual requirements and costs fly out the window. Need to scale... infintely? Just use Lambda Functions.<p>I don’t know why the author singles out Lambda. For many use cases their ongoing maintenance is close to zero.

I can see how this makes sense for a startup etc that has passed some threshold of operational complexity. As an “indie hacker” there is no way I’d be able to move out of the cloud without my costs going up by an order of magnitude.

I actually totally disagree. With the various development frameworks&#x2F;CLIs, AWS has the ecosystem benefits that can make hosting on it a breeze, and leave more time to focus on delivering value to the customer.

Whateversimple cloud service you use, it&#x27;s likely using AWS underneath anyway. Like Netlify for example, I think it&#x27;s all based on AWS.

Strange, tried to access this page with my clients vpn on, but got FortiGuard blocked because site is classified as &#x27;phishing&#x27;.

&gt; It costs how much?!<p>Less than $5&#x2F;month. Yes, on AWS. Serverless (the genuine kind, which scales to zero with pay-per-request) is <i>pretty much free</i> until you have actual users, and once you have actual users, you have <i>actual revenue</i> to pay your cloud bills. Unless your ($revenue &#x2F; $hosting_costs) is less than 1.0, in which case, you don&#x27;t have a business.<p>&gt; &quot;(LISP) programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing&quot;. A specific technology product never exists in a vaccuum — it has to communicate and co-exist with other components in the system. There are costs associated with every choice, often hidden costs.<p>An odd choice of quote, considering the author is promoting choices that costs orders of magnitude more money in the earliest stages, and inevitably provoke high migration costs when it comes time to move off those platforms.<p>&gt; Cultivate a culture of ruthlessly fighting complexity<p>Again, an odd claim. Stacks like AWS Lambda and DynamoDB let me forget about scaling concerns* (asterisk because this is true in the early stages, slightly less true later, but still mostly true compared to traditional architecture). Those concerns absolutely rear their head when handing off to a site like Render that refuses to publish public pricing for their largest database instances, or talk about <i>very</i> common usecases like read replicas for analytics workloads.<p>&gt; the harsh truth is that neither Lambda Functions, nor Kubernetes, nor Kafka on their own will magically make your app work correctly, be performant and deliver value.<p>But Redis, PostgreSQL, and PaaS-style service deployment magically will? You mean, early startup CTOs need to actually <i>think</i> about the architecture they propose to build to satisfy business needs? <i>gasp</i><p>&gt; &quot;Why do we think this choice will provide the most value for users compared to the alternatives?&quot;<p>Because serverless means <i>not</i> needing to hire DevOps. Because most companies running Kubernetes do not get anywhere near the ~38+% efficiency (last time I ran the numbers, and that&#x27;s for production environments, not even including staging&#x2F;testing&#x2F;development environments) they need to make Kubernetes more cost-efficient than AWS Lambda, because developers just <i>don&#x27;t have time</i> to figure out why the hell their services need a guaranteed vCPU, won&#x27;t perform with less, and in the meantime their services are using less than 20% of the resources they requested - and they <i>particularly</i> don&#x27;t have time to figure it out when Customer Support is happy, Product is happy, and Finance will cough up whatever budget is needed so long as Engineering says that it&#x27;s &quot;necessary&quot;. Because founders who actually think about optimizing for value, will optimize for what is scarce, and what is <i>actually</i> scarce is not money (plenty of money out there looking for the right investment opportunities that check all the right boxes), it is <i>people</i>. Serverless means hiring fewer people because you hand off undifferentiated heavy lifting.

I disagree. As a small company, having all the various AWS services available is a major competitive advantage.

If you either use or don&#x27;t use AWS based on a HN blog post, you deserve whatever happens to you.

Gross, this article mentioned terraform. Never use terraform, it is a silly thing.

C’mon guys, this week it was my turn to post the AWS bad article