AWS is extremely overengineered for startups. In order to create a simple SaaS on AWS you have to invest much more time comparing to Azure. So, I only use their S3/Route53/Email services and do the rest on Azure.
We started on AWS in ~2014 but it got too complicated for us to tolerate.
My latest AWS complexity trigger was trying to set up a public S3 bucket. It's almost like they want you to screw it up on purpose. We were mostly working with .NET/Windows Server so we looked at alternatives sometime around 2020.
Our stack today has us using AWS for domain registration & S3. We use Azure for everything else. We actually log into AWS by going to the Microsoft MyApps portal and authenticating via our AAD/Entra credentials. Microsoft's docs regarding how to set up SCIM/SAML auth to AWS are excellent [0].
In Azure, we use ~5 products: AAD/Entra ID, DNS, Azure Functions, SQL Server, Azure Blob Storage. That's it. There isn't really any VM/container presence in our go-forward infra. Everything is managed/'serverless' now. There are some VMs but they are supporting legacy systems that will eventually be turned off. We have ZERO custom networking. I couldn't explain how to manage an azure vnet to save my life. We don't need VPN tech anymore either.
Github Actions->Azure Functions is pretty much the end game CI/CD experience for me. I am not rocking this boat. I never want to try anything else. I've spend a decade of my life keeping some flavor of Jenkins alive.
Could we do all this "cheaper"? Sure. But at what cost? My mental state is something that is a non-zero factor in all of this. Keeping track of hundreds of moving pieces in production is simply overwhelming. It's unnecessary suffering. I need something I can explain in 20 minutes to a new hire if we want to remain competitive.
Our stack today has us using AWS for domain registration & S3. We use Azure for everything else. We actually log into AWS by going to the Microsoft MyApps portal and authenticating via our AAD/Entra credentials. Microsoft's docs regarding how to set up SCIM/SAML auth to AWS are excellent [0].
In Azure, we use ~5 products: AAD/Entra ID, DNS, Azure Functions, SQL Server, Azure Blob Storage. That's it. There isn't really any VM/container presence in our go-forward infra. Everything is managed/'serverless' now. There are some VMs but they are supporting legacy systems that will eventually be turned off. We have ZERO custom networking. I couldn't explain how to manage an azure vnet to save my life. We don't need VPN tech anymore either.
Github Actions->Azure Functions is pretty much the end game CI/CD experience for me. I am not rocking this boat. I never want to try anything else. I've spend a decade of my life keeping some flavor of Jenkins alive.
Could we do all this "cheaper"? Sure. But at what cost? My mental state is something that is a non-zero factor in all of this. Keeping track of hundreds of moving pieces in production is simply overwhelming. It's unnecessary suffering. I need something I can explain in 20 minutes to a new hire if we want to remain competitive.
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/referen...