[nemothekid]

>ask why they are building such a robust distributed system — SQS, SNS, etc — without any customers

I think this is one of those things that really depends on the use case. If they are performing expensive inference, I think having any queue is better than no queue. Going from a synchronous system to an asynchronous one is not easy and it's not something you would want anyone to be paged for once it starts to matter. Getting SQS/SNS up and running now could be a couple hours of work today and is practically free if your traffic is low.

Similarly I have a number of side projects that run extremely cheaply just using ECS and Fargate. I don't even think about Kubernetes really, it's just a PaaS to me that I'm shipping ARM binaries to. As a result I don't think very hard about autoscaling, failover, load balancing or deployment. A github action just pushes master to ec2 and everything "just works".