[yowlingcat]

I dunno about that. AWS is useful at a certain point, but I must say, if I want to spin up a prototype that I need to get into production ASAP with no pre-existing infra, the first tool I reach for is Heroku. It's hard to beat how clean the UX is. Why? It's opinionated. I get an instance of an RDBMS and my service. It's really easy to install Heroku apps. It doesn't make me learn unrelated abstractions to do that, or fill my life with pointless noise and bullshit.

I will always appreciate AWS for how I can rely on it in production, but it definitely require a lot more verbosity and configuration than it needs to. I wish we would remember the product design lessons DHH taught us. Convention is preferable to configuration when possible for a reason. It reduces unnecessary complexity. It makes it easier for your brain to work with.

[AlchemistCamp]

The option I suggested, Render, is essentially the new Heroku. It's focused on dev experience, run by ex-Stripe people who worked on their infra and it's much less expensive than Heroku has been post-acquisition.

If you want something managed that requires minimal time worrying about infra, they're a great choice. For something that truly requires low costs per user, I wouldn't use them but they make a ton of sense for many projects.

And to be fair, AWS also has some serious limitations in terms of price scalability compared to a VPS like Digital Ocean or Linode: https://questinglog.com/costs-are-part-of-scalability/#just-...

[yowlingcat]

I think you are comparing apples and oranges. Heroku is great not just because of its DX, but 1) because it's a subsidiary of Salesforce and I know it won't disappear tomorrow and 2) it has a thriving app ecosystem. It's a real stretch to compare a recent $2.25M seed funded upstart with it and borderline malpractice to suggest running your production workloads on it.

With AWS although you have to pay the premium on egress, you don't pay that until you leave their sandbox; what's more, you can add links into your VPC that sidestep it. If you're just running open source software or a kubes cluster on commodity boxes and you're fine owning all of your operational burden, sure. Use whatever you like. But if you want reliability and good DX, your options get narrower.

Personally, I think that AWS Code Suite and VS/Azure spaces (and GitHub spaces by proxy) are going to be the real challengers in this space. There is a real UX problem to solve but it doesn't mean I want to necessarily use a different platform.

[AlchemistCamp]

We have almost exactly opposite opinions. I would have recommended Heroku back in 2012 without question. I would not now.

If Render is good enough for Stripe's production workloads, then it's good enough for mine.

[yowlingcat]

Look, I'm not saying I doubt that. If the tool fits your needs, more power to you. But that won't be the case for everyone. Eventually, some firms need to reach for the power tools that AWS has, or simply the reach in terms of reliability. Things like SQS, Aurora, Sagemaker, CloudWatch, CloudFormation, Redshift, S3, Glacier, Lambda, Fargate, availability zone reach, raw EC2 + EBS.

It's about ecosystems. Heroku has a decent ecosystem, but nowhere near AWS or Azure. I find it far more likely that AWS and/or Azure will improve their ecosystems to attain parity with the gold standard Heroku (or Render for you) DX in the small but which can scale all the way up. But you may find that a tall tale, and if so I would understand. The track record on the AWS/Azure side isn't great. But the latter did acquire GitHub, and I fully expect them to exploit that. I would be surprised if AWS lets them 1-up their incumbency through that vector without neutralizing it.