I invested several days setting up my product's backend on Elastic Beanstalk. After several weeks, I learned that Elastic Beanstalk is not reliable.

Then I spent several days learning Kubernetes and gave up when I learned that it is overly complex and mostly undocumented.

Then I wasted a week using Packer to build EC2 AMIs and deploy with terraform and run with supervisord. I learned that Packer is slow and Linux package repositories are unreliable. Both of these things could prevent me from deploying an emergency patch. Also, there are no reliable tools to clean up old AMIs generated by Packer.

Then I spent several weeks learning Docker and migrating my product's backend to that. Docker's APIs and tooling are hard to use but at least they're reliable. And I can run the same binaries in production and on my dev machine.

Throughout this process, I frequently looked at Heroku and then remembered how much they charge. I just can't bring myself to spend $500/mo for their ops automation. Perhaps I'm being penny-wise and pound-foolish.