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Re:I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left by andrewstuart on Sunday May 10, 2026 @08:35AM (#48083496)
I worked for a startup company - the founders were really nice people and had put their own money in - quite a lot of money - to get the software built for the vision they had.

By the time I joined, 18 months after development had started, a giant, complex, hideously tentacled software beast had been built that used every possible AWS service that the massive offshore team of developers could find to use.

It should have been built on a single Linux box by a single senior developer with Python and Postgres or nodejs or Ruby or whatever.

They went out of business after not too long and I couldn't help wondering if things might have been different if they hadn't spent a fortune building a giant money making machine for AWS, instead of making a web application on a Linux box.

Every AWS project I have worked on has had some significant work put into programming AWS instead of writing business functionality.

Re:I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left by cube00 on Sunday May 10, 2026 @09:03AM (#48083654)
> hideously tentacled software beast had been built that used every possible AWS service that the massive offshore team of developers could find to use

To be fair, if they had a AWS Solution Architect involved they heavily push you down this road and if they manage to get in management's ear they'll push the idea that server-less AWS features is vastly cheaper.

If you're only responding to a handful of requests that's true, but once things ramp up you get "nickel and dimed" for everything: API Gateway requests, lambda execution time, DynamoDB read/write units, CloudWatch logs, outgoing data, step function transitions, S3 requests.

I understand all those services cost money and they shouldn't be free, but I question if paying all those micro-transactions is worse then paying for your own VMs, especially once your customers complain about the cold starts and you think you can fix it with "lambda warming"

Re:I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left by maccard on Sunday May 10, 2026 @09:16AM (#48083737)
To be fair that’s an AWS problem not a lambda problem. If you replace lambda with EC2 the only thing you save in is lambda and step functions(and maybe api gateway but now you need to pay for a load balancer or a public IP), the rest you need to pay for anyway.