Comment by theshrike79
9 days ago
Just out of curiosity, which parts of AWS were you using? EC2 and something else?
It's very simple to move when you're just using AWS as a source for VPS capacity, but when you've got lambda functions, S3, SQS, RDS and other nice acronyms in the mix the ditching becomes a lot harder to justify.
My question to that is: Why do you? Why on earth do people want to tie themselves so hard to a specific mast?
With AWS I can build the stack so that I don't need to wake up in the early hours on a Saturday to fix it. Someone at Amazon is already sweating and pulling crap off racks or reconfiguring a switch or restoring a database. At max I can go "yea, not our problem, it'll come back up when the intern at Amazon stops messing with the DNS again" on Slack, put the phone down and go back to sleep =)
Running on bare metal VPS is only viable if you're:
a) a startup with a true shoestring budget, you can get massive use out of a single mid-tier server auction server with everything on it web, backend and database AND you have someone in-house with the skills to do that.
b) you're so big you can afford to hire a full rotation of SREs to manage your crap AND your devs / SREs are able to maintain Rabbit MQ, Postgres and whatever object storage you're using themselves - and someone Does The Math and calculates it's cheaper and the risks are manageable.
In the middle there's AWS. You can run millions of revenue through AWS with maybe 2-3 people managing the backend infra. 99% of times when something breaks suddenly, it's up to Amazon to fix it.
But more specifically why build a stack tied to a single vendor?
You talk about competent SRE being hard to find and manage but then you describe needing several AWS backend specialists.
I think I'd rather have a generalized SRE team with portable infrastructure.
Maybe that's just me. I watched an org get burned by Google App Engine. I find these proprietary stacks to be a giant trap.
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I was using fargate, route 53, managed postgres. Also the container registry i think. Not nothing, not too complicated