[dasil003]

I'm not sure any sizable group is banging their head against a wall. Yes, AWS is complex. Yes, AWS has cost foot guns. These are natural outcomes of removing friction from scaling.

Sure we could start with something simpler, but as you may have noticed, even the more basic hosting providers like DigitalOcean and Linode have been adding S3-compatible object storage because of its proven utility.

In terms of making something meaningfully simpler, I think Heroku was the high water mark. But even though it was a great developer experience, the price/performance barriers were a lot more intractable than dealing with AWS.

[marcosdumay]

> These are natural outcomes of removing friction from scaling.

Yes, and making scaling frictionless brings a very tiny bit of value for everybody, but a huge amount of value for the cloud operator. Any bit of friction would completely remove that problem.

Also, focusing on scaling before efficiency benefits nobody but the cloud provider.

[geoduck14]

>Yes, and making scaling frictionless brings a very tiny bit of value for everybody

I disagree. Using AWS in a frictionless way has made the difference between not deploying applications and deploying them. In one example, I used S3 and EC2 to deploy an app used by several thousand users at work - the deployment was completely scripted and tested before the old app was taken down. It eliminated errors in deploying, increased frequency of denying (which enabled faster security patches), reduced down time from 6 hours to zero, enabled new features for our users (due to scripted testing). Everyone won - and I got a promotion :)

[tekknik]

AWS was originally built to run amazon workloads. When building software at amazon scale absolutely is one of the first things you think about.

[WaxProlix]

Heroku did so much right. I recently was toying with some bot frameworks (think Discord or IRC, nothing spammy or review-gaming) and getting everything set up on a free tier dyno with free managed sql backing it up, and a github test/build integration, all took an hour or so. Really exceeded my expectations.

Not sure how it scales for production loads but my experience was so positive I'll probably go back for future projects.

[greiskul]

Yeah, heroku is absolutely the best in just getting something running. Truth is most projects don't ever have to scale, either because they are hobby projects, or cause they just fail. Heroku is the simplest platform that I know to just quickly test something. If you do find a good market fit and then need to scale, then sure, use some time to get out of it. But for proof of concepts, rapid iteration, etc. Heroku is awesome.

[ericpauley]

I’ll argue that Fly.io is beginning to meet that need in a lot of ways, especially with managed Postgres now.