It buys you 150 machines for a month 12 core 24GB VPS with unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps link
See my comment below.
I get it, AWS looks expensive, but a bunch of their foundational services are real force-multipliers if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams.
Its just not true that AWS doesn't need expensive experts to get stuff done - it really does.
Anyone who is half decent on the command line in Linux can get all those servers installed and running without the spaghetti complexity of AWS.
The cloud as a magical place of simplicity and ease of use and infinite scalability in every direction - I think its the opposite of that - AWS is a nightmarish tangle of complexity and hard to configure, understand, relate and maintain systems.
Its MUCH easier just to load up a single powerful machine with everything you need. I'm not saying that works for all workloads but a single machine or a few machines can take you an awful long way.
For the core service I tend to favour monoliths too, but I would say you are vastly underestimating the halo of other crap needed to operationalise a real website/SaaS.
Where is your load balancer? Your database redundancy? Where are backups stored? Where are you streaming your logs for long-term retention? Where are you handling metrics/alarming?
Bare metal is great, but you have to build a ton of shit to actually ship product.
You get all if not most of this on DigitalOcean, Linode, Upcloud, Scaleway, etc all of a LOT cheaper.
> but a bunch of their foundational services are real force-multipliers if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams.
No, it's not. As above and for a lot of things AWS' complexity and silly factor can make it even worse. In GCP I can setup a dual region bucket. As simple as that. In AWS I need to setup 2 buckets, a replication role, bucket policies, lifecycle policies and a lot more just to get the same. Force multiplier? As in make it slower? EKS takes longer than the default Terraform timeout to provision. The list goes on...
Why go to the trouble of running Kubernetes on top of AWS, when ECS does roughly the same job at a fraction of the complexity?
Why use Terraform when CloudFormation maps better to the underlying primitives?
