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by hotpotamus 1345 days ago
> but it seems to me that knowing the basics of AWS (or some cloud provider) has become part of the standard developer's toolkit.

This seems to be flirting with the idea that Amazon has become a required component of hosting an application on the internet.
1 comments
chadash 1345 days ago
Required? No, I'm not saying that. But yes, it's become the industry standard. If you don't know some AWS basics and you are a generalist web developer, you'd probably do well to learn them in order to make yourself a more marketable engineer.

There are plenty of good alternatives, but AWS is the 800-pound gorilla. You have to know at least a little bit about it in order to know why not to use it.

It's like saying you don't want to use React/Angular/Vue for your web app. There are good reasons not to, but at this point you should at least have some experience with web frameworks before making a technical decision not to use them. If your answer is "I don't know them and I don't want to learn them", that's fine for a personal project, but probably not a reason not to use them at your full-time startup. If your reason is "I know React, but for my specific use case, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS is better" then you are making a more informed decision.

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hotpotamus 1345 days ago
I suppose my problem is that the enormous complexity paired with the utility billing feels like I'm trying to drink from a pool of water surrounded by enormous lurking predators (the 800-pound gorilla analogy seems apt). I think everyone has at least a story of a forgotten instance that billed them a bit more, but with "infinitely scalable" compute come infinitely scalable bills. There are instances of developers creating infinite loops in cloud functions that result in 6 figure AWS bills. Of course then the advice is to plead your case and hope for a credit, but I wouldn't expect everlasting benevolence from Bezos's machine.

I have other issues and could probably expound on them at length, but work to do and all that. I don't disagree with you that it's an important tool for engineers today (I've certainly got an account or two), but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

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