After 20 years of dev, having devops skills nearly maximized (with a AWS specialization), built/maintained/scaled many products, ... can completely relate. I really do see hostings costs differently now compared to earlier in my career, when I was more junior/midlevel where one still argues about "cool" tech/languages/architectures.
What you want from day one is a completely managed hosting for tech stack you work with, but are not hard tied to forever.
Right now I am starting some new/modern meteor.js stuff again, there is meteor galaxy for hosting that "just works" for that stack, you bring your own mongodb (I prefer atlas itself, they even have serverless now), and everything is taken care of, including CI/CD/Monitoring/... . Its like a few minutes of initial configuration, and never think about it again, and if done correctly you shold have horizontal autoscale of some kind automatically nowadays.
Yes, this is significantly more expensive than directly using AWS (which they use under the hood), and even though I am personally highly trained in this stuff+terraform/cdk/..., I don't want to have all this work anymore when I also can shell out a few hundred bucks per month instead. Just in case Galaxy becomes a problem for some reason, I _still_ can deploy the app stack to some VPS provider, but I'd use some already existing automation (like meteor-up in this case) instead of really digging into typical devops topics for it.
There is a bad feeling in the mouth as an engineer to shell out "more than needed" for infrastructure, but my rule of thumb now is that I am happy to eat that frog as long as the potential cost saving is less than 2 infrastructure engineer FTEs, thats my trigger to _maybe_ discussing it.
What you want from day one is a completely managed hosting for tech stack you work with, but are not hard tied to forever.
Right now I am starting some new/modern meteor.js stuff again, there is meteor galaxy for hosting that "just works" for that stack, you bring your own mongodb (I prefer atlas itself, they even have serverless now), and everything is taken care of, including CI/CD/Monitoring/... . Its like a few minutes of initial configuration, and never think about it again, and if done correctly you shold have horizontal autoscale of some kind automatically nowadays.
Yes, this is significantly more expensive than directly using AWS (which they use under the hood), and even though I am personally highly trained in this stuff+terraform/cdk/..., I don't want to have all this work anymore when I also can shell out a few hundred bucks per month instead. Just in case Galaxy becomes a problem for some reason, I _still_ can deploy the app stack to some VPS provider, but I'd use some already existing automation (like meteor-up in this case) instead of really digging into typical devops topics for it.
There is a bad feeling in the mouth as an engineer to shell out "more than needed" for infrastructure, but my rule of thumb now is that I am happy to eat that frog as long as the potential cost saving is less than 2 infrastructure engineer FTEs, thats my trigger to _maybe_ discussing it.