> If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself

I have tried Lambdas and then got this "oh-shit moment" when I have realized that if AWS would be to kick me out, I would be absolutely screwed.

Now I am slowly dispersing and using VMs instead and avoiding all the AWS-specific stuff as much as I can.

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reese_john 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Most cloud providers have a similar offering to AWS Lambda, plus it is not that hard to convert your code from the event handling pattern impose by AWS Lambda to a long running container running in K8s or VMs like you are doing yourself

IMO the lock-in fear is overblown as the top cloud offerings (S3, Lambdas, K8s as a service etc) are already commoditized among the top providers, the exception being specialized databases like DynamoDB, Spanner, Cosmos …

Not saying there wouldn’t be some major work to switch your operations from eg AWS to GCP, but it is also not a hard lock-in

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jacquesm 2 days ago | parent [-]

Most cloud providers have the same exact issue that AWS has: they're US based.

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keepamovin 2 days ago | parent [-]

Not Hetzner tho

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tormeh 2 days ago | parent [-]

I hesitate to call Hetzner "cloud". Hetzner is an EC2+S3 competitor, not an AWS one. IMO the minimum for being a real cloud is you need hosted Postgres, hosted Kafka, hosted Kubernetes, and S3-compatible object storage. Without the first three Hetzner is just not in the same product category. Nobody sensible buys AWS for the comically overpriced EC2.

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everfrustrated 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Another missed component is a real autoscaling load balancer. This often gets missed and taken for granted. Possibly due to if you haven't seen a good one (AWS) you might not realise what you're missing. Most aspiring "cloud" companies have fixed capacity single tennant load balancers which is not cloud in any definition.

	▲	keepamovin 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Is it so hard to wire up some health/load checks and hook the provider API to spin up more VPS?

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keepamovin 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Is it really so much cheaper to pay for "hosted" apps rather than just plumbing your own on VPS/metal?

	▲	tormeh 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's far cheaper to do it yourself, but the entire point is that you outsource the management of the service. Lots of people don't want to deal with database failovers, or - god forbid - deal with Kubernetes control plane issues.
	▲	pyrale 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		On the opposite, it is more expensive, and any large enough company should probably at least consider renting metal rather than services. For a small org, though, it lets you avoid a lot of infrastructure/ops work.

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selkin 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If your threat model is AWS deciding you break their AUP, the issue is with you doing AUP breaking stuff. This ain’t your personal Google Play account.