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But it can be a dumb pipe. More and more companies prefer that. Just deploy everything on EKS and use only foundational services such as S3 and PostgreSQL Aurora. There you go: Dumb Pipes. Edit: When I say dumb, it's more like: Dumb enough so that another public cloud vendor, such as GCP or Azure, can be swapped in.
The "all the things" approach that AWS has taken has led to a lot of great ideas being poorly executed, leading to a mess and poor engineering.
E.g., the new (V3) of the JavaScript SDK is such a clusterf*ck I almost can't believe they had the stones to ship it.
False dichotomy -- AWS is not only a dumb pipe The value I see in AWS isn't that anything is done particularly well. It's that there's enough of it that I can get most all of what I need in one place.
I recently experienced this with setapp. It’s a $12/mo subscription that offers me a couple hundred apps and utilities to choose from. When I needed more insight into Wi-Fi signal issues, I just went with their rec. same for a pomodoro timer, or clipboard enhancer. Pull up their “App Store” on my Mac, type Wi-Fi into the search, and use what they offer. So nice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cloudflare, HashiCorp, Fly.io, Oxide Computer, Vercel
Heroku* and DigitalOcean too. Hell even Hostgator. *Heroku is expensive though but is nice to use
But it can be a dumb pipe. More and more companies prefer that. Just deploy everything on EKS and use only foundational services such as S3 and PostgreSQL Aurora. There you go: Dumb Pipes. Edit: When I say dumb, it's more like: Dumb enough so that another public cloud vendor, such as GCP or Azure, can be swapped in.
Except you’ve picked out two of the most complex and deep services as “foundational”.
But it can be a dumb pipe. More and more companies prefer that. Just deploy everything on EKS and use only foundational services such as S3 and PostgreSQL Aurora. There you go: Dumb Pipes. Edit: When I say dumb, it's more like: Dumb enough so that another public cloud vendor, such as GCP or Azure, can be swapped in.
AWS is much better at the dumb, commodity services like s3, ec2 and rds (that are actually pretty smart) than they are at something like redshift, sagemaker or similar.
AWS would be a far superior product if it trended toward being a dumb pipe. The "all the things" approach that AWS has taken has led to a lot of great ideas being poorly executed, leading to a mess and poor engineering. E.g., the new (V3) of the JavaScript SDK is such a clusterf*ck I almost can't believe they had the stones to ship it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except you’ve picked out two of the most complex and deep services as “foundational”.
Huh? Yes Aurora is highly proprietary, but S3 is a commodity in many use cases.
If you never use anything that ties this stuff together (like IAM), then there is practically no point in using AWS at all, it's way too expensive to use as a 'dumb pipe'.
That said, I'm personally a fan of using things that would technically also work outside of AWS, but not shying away from the AWS-specific optimisations. I'm not going to use Kubernetes on AWS without EKS for example (plain EC2). Or Kubernetes on AWS without the Amazon's CNI, that's not a thing I'd enjoy in production either.
When managed Kafka was announced, that was another great example of "nice, now I don't have to mess with EC2 node contents anymore", but I still can if I want to, including outside of AWS.
The most AWS-native thing (or two things) that make most other offerings not work out all that great is the integrated IAM and Security Groups. Kludging those together with some crappy port to AD or NSX is just a waste of time and sanity.