Personally, I'm moving more and more away from anything AWS. Too many foot guns and its just not worth it.
1. Novelty: It is no longer cool, shiny, hip.
2. Paradox of choice: Just too many things. Though, I prefer AWS Lightsail and do use its services.
3. DevEx: Prefer easier tooling and simpler billing.
4. Realisation: Boring tech works: https://archive.is/sXPN9 (https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur/status/1455589141299675139)
Sure, I can run my personal website on a Pi, but then I have to do the hoops to try and serve it off port 80/443 since my ISP blocks it. I could spend an extra $100/month for business class, but why do that if I can get a $5 VM on lightsail that can host half a dozen small WordPress sites and a DB..
And I know S3 and CloudFront, so I can cut the costs lower and serve the static page for pennies...
I'd pay AWS $0.10/month to avoid the hassles of my ISP and Dynamic DNS..
Static website hosted in Netlify, Github/Gitlab pages or Cloudflare.
No point using AWS - 1000 pound gorilla with dozens of services and features PLUS _unbounded_ billing - if you have only a basic use case such as static page
Disclaimer: I work at AWS, but not involved in billing. The below is my personal experience having dealt with AWS outside of my current role there.
I agree its not worth it if you're just hosting a static page, but if you're using it for other development it can be worthwhile. (I have to admit that Cloudflare/R2 is looking promising for static hosting, although workers seem a bit more limited than lambda. Definitely an interesting ecosystem to keep an eye on)
Even thought it has unbounded billing, in the case of mistakes or unexpected surges, they're often willing to assist and even nix charges. Ultimately, they'd rather you continue using the service and pay future bills than have you quit while they try to collect on a bill you can't pay.
On my personal account, I have billing alerts configured low, and its billed via SEPA from a separate bank account that I use just for cloud providers (N26 makes it easy to configure a separate account with a distinct IBAN). In the unlikely event goes over the amount I have in that account, it'll fail to charge me and I can look into disputing the charges.
but if aws support decides not to help, or won't clear as much as expected
you'd have a credit to AWS which they could possibly try to collect by other means besides direct debit, such as debt collection
The paradox of choice doesn't apply here, you don't have to choose between every service offered. You can pick the one or few that work for you and reuse, reuse, reuse. I find it great for small operations; free tiers for really tiny projects, and the choice of managed services for a higher fee but way less maintenance - especially handy for small businesses who don't have the people to be worrying about architecture every day.
They are at odds (but I allow myself to use a few shiny, new things that I like [0]), but they are also part of the reason I don't use AWS.
> The paradox of choice doesn't apply here, you don't have to choose between every service offered.
Well: https://nitter.net/QuinnyPig/status/1504118950019284995
kubernetes on the other hand....think will be replaced by fargate/ecs, I still struggle to know why startups with a dozen container services need kubernetes. Not having opinionated standard creates so much complexity with endless amount of configurations.
K8S: many vendors collaborating on a API they all implement
I'd call kubernetes the emerging standard.