alt Hacker NewsYes, that's my preference too and nobody can convince me that an AWS setup is better unless you have millions of users.
I think that a lot of devs just think they _have_ to do it that way, or they over-optimize too early and build the ultimate system before they even know if anyone will use the app or site.
The biggest benefit to me as a developer at least in larger organizations that AWS gives is ownership of my stack and needs. I don’t need to file a purchase request for new servers to spin something up or deploy a new application. I don’t need to fight with other departments for the fixed CPU and memory capacities in our virtualization system.
But everything else would be so much simpler and better for most of the things I do if it could just be a normal box with normal software.
In theory I could build that experience with nothing but bare EC2 instances. But once you’re in AWS, they make using their managed things so tempting that convincing everyone else to not use them is an even bigger battle.