[buffalobuffalo]

As a software engineer who doesn't really like devops and has been in this position multiple times, I'm a huge fan of buying à la carte services from different providers that specialize in managing a specific type of service (often since they are the developer/maintainer of said service). As long as you make sure they are all in the same datacenter, you still get great performance. And typically minimal configuration woes.

For example:

datacenter - aws: us-east-2

Dockerized Webservers/task servers: Render or Engineyard

Postgres & Kafka: aiven or 84codes

Redis: Redis labs

Unified logging Elastic or Grafana

I still end up using some underlying AWS services like S3 and lambda, but it's a lot less work than managing an entire AWS ecosystem with security groups/VPC/networking etc.

[nijave]

That can work well but you have to be careful/mindful of egress charges and latency (if the server supports co-locating in the same cloud or even managing directly in your account, it can alleviate those issues)