> 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.
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.
1. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cosmos-db/...