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totallywrong

Right, like AWS is set and forget.

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Depending on what parts of AWS you use it is.

Fargate, S3, Aurora etc. These are managed services and are incredibly reliable.

Lot of people here seem to think these cloud providers are just a bunch of managed servers. It's far more than that.

Even the "easy" services like that have at least _some_ barrier to entry. IAM alone is a pretty big beast and I doubt someone whose never used AWS would grasp it their very first time logging into the web interface - and every service uses it extensively.

And then there's the question of whether you're going to use Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation, etc or click through the GUI to manage things.

My point is, nothing in AWS is 100% turnkey like a lot of folks pretend it is. Most of the time, it's leadership that thinks since AWS is "Cloud" that it's as simple as put in your credit card and you're done.

IAM and IaC is only needed once you get to a certain size.

For smaller projects you can absolutely get away with just the UI.

IAM is absolutely NOT something you can just ignore unless you have a huge pile of cash to burn when your shit gets compromised.

I worked at a startup, hosted on AWS, that was deployed before EC2 IAM roles were a thing. We had the same AWS access key credentials deployed on every machine. Whenever an employee left, we had to rotate them all.. Fun times.

You absolutely need IAM immediately, if you have any services talking to any other services.

You _should_ use IaC immediately as well, because the longer you delay, the more it's going to hurt when you finally do need it.

There are companies earning money by showing other companies how to reduce their AWS bill.

Exactly. A more accurate figure would be the difference between the work hours spent maintaining bare metal minus the work hours spent maintaining AWS. Impossible to know without internals but at least a point in favor of bare metal

Set and forget until you wake up to an astronomical bill one morning.

It has been for us. Then again, we only use predictable, sane services.

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