Ask HN: AWS users, is simplifying AWS a problem worth solving as a startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: AWS users, is simplifying AWS a problem worth solving as a startup?

4 pointskamrani16 comments

Is simplifying AWS a problem worth solving as a startup, or do you wish there was a product that simplifies AWS significantly so you could spend almost no time on it?

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Yes. There are a few companies in this space already. If you scan through https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?industry=Infrastructur... you'll see some.

There are hosting providers that are both simpler and cheaper than AWS, like Digital Ocean or Hetzner. People who chose AWS probably want the additional features. So make sure that, for some kind of users, you're better than both.

Thanks, interesting link.

Well, I was thinking more like a platform that simplifies using your AWS account for you.

I know that different people/teams might have different requirements, and simple means different things to them. I'm just trying to understand how much it can be helpful for people to provide such a service.

As of 2021, AWS comprises over 200 products and services including computing, storage, networking, database, analytics, application services, deployment, management, machine learning, mobile, developer tools, RobOps and tools for the Internet of Things

What do you want to simplify?

The main services you use to host your applications, and the core components you need in pretty much every application.

This can mean hosting static websites, applications on ECS, EKS, database, and Redis. Also it includes all the necessary underlying networking set up.

The rest of services are usually provided in their simplest possible form anyway.

Depending on the needs of your clients then that could be a simple digitalocean or heroku, but as they grow out and demand additional services will you be able to offer those or will they have to migrate?

On networking, you could set it up for them but would it be opinionated, ie your way only, or provide the flexibility of AWS and azure networking, vpc, gateways, transits and topology flex, and if not the client may feel constrained.

To better help you then I think you should draft up the service you intend to deliver and test if the market wants that, vs competitor offerings vs AWS scale. And I mean lofi don’t build, test the well defined proposition.

Well to be clear, my question was to provide the service on your own AWS account. This way, you'll have access to all those extra services whenever you need them, and at the same time you can benefit from all the simplicity of such a PaaS experience.

The service connects to your AWS account and builds stuff for you in your own account, if it makes sense.

Vercel on the frontend and Heroku on the backend already do this, so you have something specific in mind?

Yup, providing same experience as Heroku on AWS.

The reason being it's a lot cheaper (almost by 10 fold in some cases), and easy integration with services like SQS/SNS.

Heroku is on AWS. But I agree that making more components simple to use is helpful.

Vercel also on the backend if you're using Next.js API routes, I guess

It really depends on how complex your solution is and how AWS savvy your team are.

I'd argue that if your team is writing business logic code, it's not going to be a huge time investment to get them up to speed with the various AWS API's so they can operate the infra.

So, who do you think benefits from such a service?

Yes including yours :). I am building one myself for our internal infrastructure. There is definitely a need to build a service that wraps on top of AWS but you have to go niche. Cannot do everything.

Can you be more specific about going niche? I'm keen to see what would be a good example in your mind.

Personally, I would focus on the 75-80% of cases where you don't need things like ECS, Kubernetes etc etc. Give me a simple choice to setup either a low traffic web site/app (perhaps a single EC2 running say a framework) and do all the goodies like SSL, DB provisioning for me. or give me a choice to setup a bit more highly available site which uses Load balancers with couple of EC2 servers and boom. Don't overcomplicate.

I am literally trying to solve a problem in AWS Infra right now where I want to setup PHP/Laravel apps on demand and all the tools that exist are way too complicated. I want a simple UI that asks me for the domain, github repo and a couple of questions (db/cache etc) and then boom. It setups the site.

What makes you think it's going to be more complicated if you use ECS behind the scene?

What if I tell you I have a service that is able to do that it takes away all the complexities. You literally need no understanding of the underlying services, you just benefit from its flexibility, and simplicity.

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