1. Vercel Phase My first project used Vercel. Since my project was Next.js, the experience was decent. But as my project gained some users, I found that even for projects under 100 users, I needed to pay $20 per month. Since my service didn't require high performance, this cost felt steep.
2. Self-host Phase (Hetzner + Coolify) Later, I started setting up my own server with Hetzner and deploying with Coolify. Since Coolify is open-source and free, I only had to cover the cost of a VPS (even $5 a month was sufficient). I could deploy PostgreSQL instances and run a web server on it. But later I discovered that even this way, I still had to spend a lot of effort maintaining PostgreSQL and Redis. Even though they were containerized with Docker, managing them was still troublesome. I needed to pass various system and environment variables between services, which was very tedious.
3. Cloudflare Phase So later I switched to Cloudflare. With Cloudflare Workers, I can deploy fullstack applications and use D1 Database and Cloudflare KV to replace Redis. These features can be called directly within the Worker without needing to pass environment variables.
Plus, the local development experience is excellent and the pricing is very reasonable, so I've been using Cloudflare's entire suite ever since.
This is completely backwards, at least with OpenSearch and Valkey. AWS didn't create the forks until after the upstream projects changed their license, so it's really weird to say that the forks "resulted" in the license changes when those forks where a response to the license changes. With Valkey in particular it was members of the former redis core development team that created Valkey.
And every time it's a nightmare. I'm just banging out a server for my experimental card game, not setting up an new financial institution. Everything looks as if I'm preparing to scale to infinity tomorrow, with a staff of a thousand and a budget backed by VCs.
Fortunately there's Netlify and similar, who put a gloss on it so that I don't have to boil the ocean. I figure that one of these days I might actually be forced to learn IAM and VPNs and God only knows what else. Meantime, every time I touch it my eyes bug out.
Well, besides for the fact that the author's got suspended for no reason, WorkMail is being shut down March 2027 anyway. I recommend checking out Purelymail for a budget, batteries included option.
Innovation has ground to a halt of mostly just meh “hey us too” launches. Pricing and design patterns feel increasingly focused on locking you in. AWS folks tell me internally they talk a lot about making sure things are “sticky” with customers. The best engineering talent no longer wants to work there and it shows, especially in places like AI where AWS has just released wave after wave of discombobulated nonsense.
As a core “rent-a-server” concept with a few add on services there’s still a lot of utility, but AWS is gradually becoming a boring baseline utility with a ton of distracting half baked stuff jammed on top. Most companies I talk to are no longer focused on single cloud and increasingly are bringing a lot of workloads back on prem or in colos. Not everything, but for a lot of stuff that just makes more sense and is a heck of a lot cheaper.
AWS isn’t going away, but its future looks a lot less exciting and inspiring than the story that got us to this point.
I saw some 192 core instances on Vultr, but I haven't tried them yet. What are you doing with all them cores?
I often fantasized about spinning up hundreds of nodes for various projects that needed number crunching. Then realized "wait I can just rent one big box for an hour" haha. It's really cool that we can do that now.
The writing has been on the wall for a few years now, and this is particularly evident to those thar have worked at AWS: Amazon is in its day-2 era.
Amazon being in its day-2 era means that most of what has been written in the past twenty years about Amazon is bot valid anymore.
“Customer obsession” is literally their first leadership principle, and stellar support was their defining characteristic.
Am I the only one who remembers that VPSes and dedicated hosting services were a thing before AWS came around? Yes you had to pay for a month at a time and scaling wasn’t as instant, but it wasn’t like the only option before cloud computing was having to drive to the datacentre and install your own server.
I’ve a couple of apps doing a few million a day. I am using Hetzner and before that used DigitalOcean. Mind you, for close to a decade.
People are unnecessarily complicating stuff, and these clouds can go very expensive very quickly.
Recently, I came across a company and they were spending $20k a month on GCP. I am like, are you kidding me, $20K for the kind of stuff you do??? It seems you do not understand how CPU, RAM and Disk work to plaster such "autoscaling hyper solutions" burning money in cloud.
I moved their stuff out of the GCP managed solution and ended up with a $200-400 per month bill. The CEO can still not believe how it's even possible.
I suggested them move to Dedicated servers but they didn't want it, they said they must show they are on Hyperscaling cloud.
OK fine, we'll stay in Hyperscaler but not use any of their service other than VMs.
They racked up a ton of bills by using cloud monitoring, Datastore, and autoscalers (with no proper tuning), Kubernetes.
I replaced all of it with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and most stuff from Datastore to Postgres and Mongo with replicas. I added Redis.
I implemented a custom scaler where you can scale off of app metrics, not by just using a random peg on CPU.
I implement hot data reload by packing the data updates in gzip file, uploading to GCS and pulling from autoscaled units. Moved the stuff to Spot VMs.
The complexity of stuff in cloud is high for nothing.
Lambda is incredibly simple to use, it just runs a function for you.
Not sure how you could burn so much with dynamodb. It’s serverless and incredibly cheap. Must have been doing something insane like a huge dataset where you scan through it over and over.
Being salty that Gary couldn’t sell enough of his paid service and AWS is competing with it isn’t a meaningful complaint. I want something in AWS, not on Gary’s servers.
AWS CLI??? Holy guacamole, what a mess. AWS CLI looks what is now the digital identification to get the basics done.
While GCP CLI is like "sure, here"!
Hey good lookin'
