31–40 of 684 posts
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What amazes me is how Heroku absolutely nailed what most web apps need nearly 20 years ago.
I miss heroku dearly. somewhere at Salesforce there is an exec who killed the product and shifted it to enterprise and is now looking at the vibe coding revolution seeing their opportunity missed.
> AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed ahead with OpenSearch, Valkey, and DocumentDB anyway, capturing the hosted-service money after those communities and companies had built the markets; the result was a wave of defensive licenses like SSPL, Elastic License, RSAL, and other source-available models…
1. Vercel Phase My first project used Vercel. Since my project was Next.js, the experience was decent. But as my project gained some users, I found that even for projects under 100 users, I needed to pay $20 per month. Since my service didn't require high performance, this cost felt steep.
2. Self-host Phase (Hetzner + Coolify) Later, I started setting up my own server with Hetzner and deploying with Coolify. Since Coolify is open-source and free, I only had to cover the cost of a VPS (even $5 a month was sufficient). I could deploy PostgreSQL instances and run a web server on it. But later I discovered that even this way, I still had to spend a lot of effort maintaining PostgreSQL and Redis. Even though they were containerized with Docker, managing them was still troublesome. I needed to pass various system and environment variables between services, which was very tedious.
3. Cloudflare Phase So later I switched to Cloudflare. With Cloudflare Workers, I can deploy fullstack applications and use D1 Database and Cloudflare KV to replace Redis. These features can be called directly within the Worker without needing to pass environment variables.
Plus, the local development experience is excellent and the pricing is very reasonable, so I've been using Cloudflare's entire suite ever since.
The writing has been on the wall for a few years now, and this is particularly evident to those thar have worked at AWS: Amazon is in its day-2 era.
Amazon being in its day-2 era means that most of what has been written in the past twenty years about Amazon is bot valid anymore.
“Customer obsession” is literally their first leadership principle, and stellar support was their defining characteristic.
Innovation has ground to a halt of mostly just meh “hey us too” launches. Pricing and design patterns feel increasingly focused on locking you in. AWS folks tell me internally they talk a lot about making sure things are “sticky” with customers. The best engineering talent no longer wants to work there and it shows, especially in places like AI where AWS has just released wave after wave of discombobulated nonsense.
As a core “rent-a-server” concept with a few add on services there’s still a lot of utility, but AWS is gradually becoming a boring baseline utility with a ton of distracting half baked stuff jammed on top. Most companies I talk to are no longer focused on single cloud and increasingly are bringing a lot of workloads back on prem or in colos. Not everything, but for a lot of stuff that just makes more sense and is a heck of a lot cheaper.
The chips business in Annapurna is probably the most interesting thing and that plays to its strength of the boring low level infrastructure stuff. Nearly everything AWS tries to do beyond chips and rent-a-server plays is a hot mess.
AWS isn’t going away, but its future looks a lot less exciting and inspiring than the story that got us to this point.
Well, besides for the fact that the author's got suspended for no reason, WorkMail is being shut down March 2027 anyway. I recommend checking out Purelymail for a budget, batteries included option. Another option is to run your own server but have it use something like AWS SES to send externally, avoiding the IP reputation issue.
AWS AIM is hot garbage, GCP might not be the coolest kid of the block but its AIM rocks. AWS CLI??? Holy guacamole, what a mess. AWS CLI looks what is now the digital identification to get the basics done. While GCP CLI is like "sure, here"!
It's a shame GCP's console and their CLI are both so painfully slow. You're also putting your business at risk with Google randomly banning accounts and not providing timely appeals. [1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798827
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What amazes me is how Heroku absolutely nailed what most web apps need nearly 20 years ago.
I miss heroku dearly. somewhere at Salesforce there is an exec who killed the product and shifted it to enterprise and is now looking at the vibe coding revolution seeing their opportunity missed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day. You aren't required to implement every enterprise pattern in the book.
But that's costly. Speaking of my own experience: going from a webapp fully hosted on an EC2 instance to a railway and vercel setup reduced my costs 10x.