I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Cloud vs VPS / Self‑Hosting

  • Many argue typical startups and small apps can run on a single VPS or a few dedicated servers (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, etc.) for a fraction of hyperscaler cost.
  • Several anecdotes of companies cutting cloud bills from tens of thousands to a few hundred dollars by moving off managed services to simpler VMs and OSS (Postgres, Redis, Prometheus, Grafana, etc.).
  • Counterpoint: critics say this often trades away redundancy, durability, and managed logging/monitoring; risk profile changes, not eliminated.

AWS Complexity & IAM

  • Recurrent theme: AWS feels overengineered for hobby projects; console and IAM are intimidating and “enterprise first.”
  • Others respond that you can still just run a basic EC2 VM, and that IAM, STS, and core services are actually well-designed compared to other clouds—just complex by nature.
  • Some see the console UX and lack of inline pricing as “adversarial” design.

Billing, Pricing, and Footguns

  • Strong frustration with opaque pricing, egress fees, and lack of hard spending limits.
  • AWS credits and free tiers encourage heavy use of proprietary services; when credits expire, bills can spike dramatically.
  • Some view complex billing as intentional revenue optimization; others say it’s inherent to usage-based models.

Serverless & Managed Services

  • Split opinions on Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, ElastiCache:
    • Fans praise Lambda and DynamoDB as cheap, low‑ops, especially at low or spiky volumes.
    • Critics highlight cold starts, configuration complexity, “nickel‑and‑diming” per request/unit, and poorer performance vs self‑hosted Redis/DBs.
  • Consensus: great for certain patterns, dangerous if misused or treated like generic SQL/VMs.

Open Source & AWS Forks

  • Debate over AWS’s forking and monetizing of popular OSS (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Redis/Valkey, etc.).
  • One camp blames AWS for “eating the ecosystem’s lunch,” forcing projects into restrictive licenses.
  • Another camp says these projects chose permissive licenses and later changed business models; competition on hosting is seen as legitimate.

Alternatives & Ecosystem

  • Strong nostalgia for Heroku-style simplicity; praise for modern PaaS and edge platforms (Vercel, Render, Fly, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean).
  • Mixed views on GCP and Azure: some find GCP IAM and VMs simpler; others highlight random bans and quota issues, or Azure security incidents.
  • Several note that AWS persists largely due to enterprise procurement friction, existing expertise, and generous startup credits, not inherent simplicity.