I don't understand why so many people want to use AWS for such small budgets. At that scale wouldn't it be easier to just build everything out of a few VMs at a cheap service?
AWS is awesome when you have a large number of resources, that are created programmatically and reproducibly, with redundancy and duplicate environments.
The budgeting tools are really amazing at letting you categorize your costs and create appropriate alerts. The permissions system lets you define very specific roles.
Its complex. But if your system is complex, it gives you the tools to keep track of it all. If you have a <=$5000/month budget, it is probably too small to make sense in AWS. You can probably run your system on a couple servers.
> At that scale wouldn't it be easier to just build everything out of a few VMs at a cheap service?
I have a handful of AWS Lambda functions with a DynamoDB backend serving hundreds of clients, my bill for the month of April was $0.01.
No, a VM wouldn't cut it.
But you are right that there are certain slots where AWS doesn't make sense: There's one in the lower middle range where you can save a bunch of money by using a VM or two with your own DB servers. And there's the one where you're so big it might actually be worth it to implement the whole stack yourself.
It's a common backend for chat bots (Discord, Matrix, IRC, Telegram).
Basically it takes different inputs and commands and uses different APIs to fetch data based on the input efficiently without the need for web scraping. DynamoDB is used mostly as a cache for common queries so I don't go over API quotas.
Most of the bots are made by me, but with AWS API Gateway I can easily generate API keys for anyone else and keep track of their usage.
> At that scale wouldn't it be easier to just build everything out of a few VMs at a cheap service?
No. I looked into AWS vs Azure vs Cloudflare vs Digital Ocean for something I'd like to build this year and (for my thing) Cloudflare (Workers) was the best balance of cost, scalability, and maintainability.
> I don't understand why so many people want to use AWS for such small budgets.
Serverless (I hate the term) makes a lot of sense for small budgets and projects. You're investing very little, so the downside of (severe) vendor lock-in is somewhat low. The upside is HA infrastructure, horizontal scalability, zero maintenance, ignorable monitoring (at least initially), consumption based costs, etc..
The biggest problem with all of them, except Digital Ocean, is that it's difficult to "own" your data in the sense that you can download a copy of a DB and keep using it somewhere else. IIRC Digital Ocean has a fairly nice managed PostgreSQL offering, but it still scales similar to a traditional DB (ie: not automatically).
The next biggest problem with AWS and Azure is that you can't figure out what anything costs, at least not easily. For example, I know for a page I'd want to serve via Cloudflare Workers, I could do 1 hit = 1 point read from Azure CosmosDB, but I couldn't figure out if the pricing includes egress. Just look at the pricing page for CosmosDB [1]. It's ridiculously complicated and that's one service on Azure.
Linux server administration requires a certain amount of know-how and determination. I can't tell you how many times I had to rebuild a DigitalOcean server because I messed something up and wanted to start with a clean slate.
A lot of hackathons, workshops and courses ask you to use AWS these days. Whether it's to run machine learning instances, win a sponsor prize or learn how to use Lambda, students are often encouraged to learn one of the major cloud providers.
Also it's a resume boost. It's another buzzword you can add to your resume.
AWS is awesome when you have a large number of resources, that are created programmatically and reproducibly, with redundancy and duplicate environments.
The budgeting tools are really amazing at letting you categorize your costs and create appropriate alerts. The permissions system lets you define very specific roles.
Its complex. But if your system is complex, it gives you the tools to keep track of it all. If you have a <=$5000/month budget, it is probably too small to make sense in AWS. You can probably run your system on a couple servers.