AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

Re:AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questio... by nostrebored on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @08:00PM (#45754725)

This is a toupee situation. Every effective company I've worked at has a slim platform team that might make some nice company specific templates for how to deploy, but individual teams were responsible for creating and owning their infra. The idea of having an AWS ops team is absurd if you're not at a truly massive company (XX,000+)

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Re:AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questio... by sgarland on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @10:38PM (#45755827)

I have never, ever seen dev-created infra that was well done, much less with repeatable IaC. It’s always résumé-driven nonsense based on whatever someone read on blogs, and they have no clue how any of it works, only that the output what they expect.

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Re:AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questio... by whstl on Thursday October 30, 2025 @08:16AM (#45759182)

Recently I've seen a lot of IaC created by dev, unfortunately. All vibe-coded, of course.

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Re:AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questio... by nostrebored on Thursday October 30, 2025 @10:34AM (#45760467)

Could definitely be skewed by my time at AWS and working for companies that hire ex-AWS people, but I've never seen infra being the real third-party roadblock. I've always seen a design review -> IaC creation pipeline that's relatively fast.

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Re:AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questio... by vidarh on Thursday October 30, 2025 @04:36AM (#45757666)

The "AWS ops team" is often 1-2 people and often part of the dev team formally, often augmented by external consultancies like mine. You start seeing that kind of structure in teams with 10+ people when the dev created infra starts collapsing under its own weight and they realise they need people with actual ops skillset.

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Re:AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questio... by nostrebored on Thursday October 30, 2025 @10:29AM (#45760392)

I have literally never seen this at 20, 400, or 3000 engineers. But the companies that I've worked at have all been "name brand" or startups on the path to acquisition.

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Re:AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questio... by vidarh on Friday October 31, 2025 @06:19AM (#45770347)

I've literally seen this at many dozens of companies, including both "name brand" and startups on the path to acquisition.

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Re:AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questio... by whstl on Thursday October 30, 2025 @08:21AM (#45759235)

Same difference. Just because the huge amount of AWS work is distributed among other teams doesn't mean it's less work.

AWS in 2025 is way more work than Heroku/Fly/Vercel, but also more way work than renting bare metal from say Hetzner/OVH, and perhaps even more than renting colo.

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Re:AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questio... by nostrebored on Thursday October 30, 2025 @10:32AM (#45760435)

This is only true if you're not using value added services. In my experience, teams that don't accelerate by adopting cloud won't use something like SQS or Fargate, they'll throw an MQ on a k8s cluster and get enraged when it doesn't work how they expected.

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Re:AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questio... by vidarh on Friday October 31, 2025 @06:21AM (#45770360)

I literally right now have two customers I'm working to untangle from "value added" services because they've become a threat to the financial viability of their services vs. running their own alternatives.

AWS services are great quality, but they are extremely expensive.

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