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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>I would also be interested to hear the other side of the coin. Who out there is using 20+ AWS/Azure/GCP products to back a single business app and is having a fantastic time of it?

Netflix uses a lot of AWS higher-level services beyond the basics of EC2 + S3. Netflix definitely doesn't restrict its use of AWS to only be a "dumb data center". Across various tech presentations by Netflix engineers, I count at least 17 AWS services they use.

+ EC2, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, EMR, ELB, Redshift, Lambda, Kinesis, VPC, Route 53, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, SQS, SES, ECS, SimpleDB, <probably many more>.

I think we can assume they use 20+ AWS services.

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Certain services IMHO have to be discounted from this list:

- VPC - basic building block for any AWS-based infra that isn't ancient

- CloudTrail - only way to get audit logs out of AWS, no matter what you feed them into

- CloudWatch - similar with CloudTrail, many things (but not all) will log to CloudWatch, and if you use your own log infra you'll have to pull from it. Also necessary for metrics.

- ELB/ELBv2/NLB/ALB - for many reasons they are often the only ways to pull traffic to your services deployed on AWS. Yes, you can sometimes do it another way around, but you have high chances of feeling the pain.

My personal typical set for AWS is EC2, RDS, all the VPC/ELB/NLB/ALB stack, Route53, CloudTrail + CloudWatch. S3 and RDS as needed, as both are easily moved elsewhere.

I don't think you can discount them like that. Maybe they aren't as front of mind as services like S3, EC2, etc, but if you were to try to rebuild your setup in a personal data center, replacing the capabilities of VPC, IAM, CloudTrail, NAT gateways, ELBs, KMS etc would be a huge effort on your part. The fact that they are "basic building blocks" makes them more important, not less. In a discussion about the complexity of cloud providers versus other setups, that seems especially relevant.

Oh, I meant it more in terms of "can you count on them as optional services".

Because they aren't optional, and yes, it takes non trivial amount to replicate them... but funnily enough, several of them have to be replicated elsewhere too.

NAT gateways usually aren't an issue, KMS for many places can be done relatively quickly with Hashicorp Vault.

IAM is a weird case, because unless you're building a cloud for others to use it's not necessarily that important, meanwhile your own authorization framework is necessary even on AWS because you can't just piggy back on IAM (I wish I could).

I mostly agree, although ECS with Fargate is often nicer to use than EC2

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