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Comment by re-thc | Hacker News Reader

> And then you get to stand up your own databases, load balancers, monitoring, logging, etc.

You get all if not most of this on DigitalOcean, Linode, Upcloud, Scaleway, etc all of a LOT cheaper.

> but a bunch of their foundational services are real force-multipliers if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams.

No, it's not. As above and for a lot of things AWS' complexity and silly factor can make it even worse. In GCP I can setup a dual region bucket. As simple as that. In AWS I need to setup 2 buckets, a replication role, bucket policies, lifecycle policies and a lot more just to get the same. Force multiplier? As in make it slower? EKS takes longer than the default Terraform timeout to provision. The list goes on...

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I think a lot of folks make their lives unnecessarily complicated by trying to do things on AWS in an explicilty non-AWS way (I inherited a startup codebase last year that did this to themselves in spades).

Why go to the trouble of running Kubernetes on top of AWS, when ECS does roughly the same job at a fraction of the complexity?

Why use Terraform when CloudFormation maps better to the underlying primitives?

Less vendor lockin.

My devex team has developed helm charts we can use that automatically detect EKS, AKS or gcp K8s and configure the parts of an app to work with each environment, but the end users of the helm chart don’t really have to care.

Vendor lockin. Knowledge transfer.

And I disagree that AWS is less complex. Managing services across AWS is complex, K8s is as well but I would rather manage K8S on bare instances.

> Why go to the trouble of running Kubernetes on top of AWS, when ECS does roughly the same job at a fraction of the complexity?

Because it doesn't. ECS has its own complexities - perhaps as a result of EC2 fleets / autoscaling groups and more. Suddenly you need launch templates and it goes on. Have you tried updating ECS via CLI? It's largely confusing.

> Why use Terraform when CloudFormation maps better to the underlying primitives?

If only. It has gotten better, but historically CloudFormation has a lot of missing features and still do. Cloudformation can get stuck for hours and you'd just have to wait. The cross region support is terrible. Not to say Terraform doesn't have its quirks, but it's definitely not "worse".

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