> DigitalOcean even has really helpful templates to start up basic servers.
> I'll admit I'm a sucker for infrastructure as code.
... which you have to maintain, which probably means Ansible/Chef/Puppet/Salt/etc scripts. Which is fine, it's just a trade-off. I've spent weeks maintaining those kinds of things though, and inevitably when you come back in a year, something's broken.
CloudFormation isn't great, but it usually gets the things provisioned - CF Cognito support sucks though, and haven't been impressed with Cognito at all. Seems too enterprise-y. Like e.g. CodeBuild, which supports 0 open-source use-cases. IDK what some of those teams are doing, but even Azure Pipelines is years ahead.
I think that's a general problem with AWS at the moment. Too many sub-par offerings. Still worth it for S3, DynamoDB, SQS, and Lambda or EC2 (just, the EC2 UX is awful). And those are huge time savers.
I guess my point is I'm going to have to maintain something, it's more useful for me to know how to maintain a PostgreSQL installation than it is some custom Amazon framework or tool. Serverless certainly hasn't been the "fire and forget" system I was sold on. And for just starting up, I can stage an Ubuntu server and set it to auto-update and really not have to touch it for quite a while. I happen to have extensive sysadmin experience and authored a reasonably popular provisioning tool, but I can appreciate not everyone wants to learn it. However, getting AppSync with its Velocity templates talking to DynamoDB and authenticating with Cognito requires quite a bit of knowledge as well. And time spent learning that only benefits you if you never leave the AWS ecosystem.
I suppose I could look at Aurora instead, although Amplify only supports MySQL Aurora, so no luck with Postgres again. Likewise, the price advantage goes away. And now I'm stuck figuring out a wildly convoluted TCO calculator. I could look at another hosted DB solution, but now I either need to move everything to a new provider or find a way to deal with WAN latency for simple DB operations. Moving means learning yet even more otherwise useless knowledge about a single provider.
I'm sure a lot of this is just growing pains. But as a lone dev just poking at something in his spare time, all these "get running in 30 min. or less" tutorials fall apart the moment you try to do something outside that tutorial. And the number of services available, their weird pricing structures, their implicit deficiencies and explicit limitations, just mean I'm still wasting time not building software :-/
> I'll admit I'm a sucker for infrastructure as code.
... which you have to maintain, which probably means Ansible/Chef/Puppet/Salt/etc scripts. Which is fine, it's just a trade-off. I've spent weeks maintaining those kinds of things though, and inevitably when you come back in a year, something's broken.
CloudFormation isn't great, but it usually gets the things provisioned - CF Cognito support sucks though, and haven't been impressed with Cognito at all. Seems too enterprise-y. Like e.g. CodeBuild, which supports 0 open-source use-cases. IDK what some of those teams are doing, but even Azure Pipelines is years ahead.
I think that's a general problem with AWS at the moment. Too many sub-par offerings. Still worth it for S3, DynamoDB, SQS, and Lambda or EC2 (just, the EC2 UX is awful). And those are huge time savers.