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You may be better off without AWS/GCP/Azure

/ 2 min read

All these cloud providers have certifications, courses, training, etc. and that’s for a reason. The services that they have there are amazing, flexible and allow companies to do the craziest of things.

They are also extremely complicated.

I’ve seen many times when companies go with one of these big cloud providers to deploy their relatively simple service, like a static react site or a Next.js server and get sidetracked by figuring out S3 permissions, SSL, EC2 instances, Fargate containerization, and setting up API gateway in front of their one serverless function that they needed for one particular feature of theirs.

It turned into a nightmare: delays in feature release, weird system-caused bugs and immense costs!

When you have a team of 5 devs and you need to be as agile as possible, release fast, validate and reiterate, that’s not what you want. In my opinion, you should go with PaaS, i.e. platform as a service. Yes, they could cost you more monthly than what Amazon advertises on their cost sheet. But in practice, you’ll end up paying less in both monetary and effort terms.

AWS and other “big players” are doing a better job now though, with their API Gateway-less serverless functions and services like Amplify. But still, nothing will beat a platform that focuses on simplifying a dev life.

Here are some options for you:

PS Notice I don’t have Heroku listed here. That’s because a) never been a big fan; and b) they’re removing their free-tier options, which, in my opinion, is a bad move. 🤷