aws core primitives are:
- flexible
- reliable
- robust
if your service succeeds, you will definitely want to move some components out of aws, but not all of it. aws can always remain the control plane.
if you don’t need what aws offers, don’t use it. they offer it at a price, and it is what it is. thanks to other providers, it likely will remain fair over time.
what i outlined was how to make aws cheap(er). it’s a simple strategy:
- use the primitives: s3, ec2, nvme, route53, lambda, apigateway
- avoid the services: rds and all the rest
- avoid heavy egress: use cloudflare workers and r2
scaling to zero means avoiding things like kms keys.
not sure where you got apigateway pricing from, it definitely scales to zero without fixed minimum cost.
lambda will always be the most reliable part of your stack. when you have enough traffic that it’s worth it, use ec2 instead and let lambda manage those machines.