I agree with the sentiment of this post. I have also worked at small startups in the past for which AWS is overkill but they insist on being on AWS because they

I agree with the sentiment of this post. I have also worked at small startups in the past for which AWS is overkill but they insist on being on AWS because they use it as a selling point to investors (I know, this sounds silly), i.e. they are using it to name drop "cool" tech, something investors seem to "love". My perception of AWS is that it is an infrastructure environment onto which you can build your own hosting environment. AWS isn't just designed for web based applications, even though most of the AWS users will use it for that purpose. It's a box of parts with which you can piece together the environment you need and that requires skills, knowledge and a good grasp of how it all works (on an AWS specific level). Another issue I keep running into is that developers use some of the AWS services as integral parts of their application, SQS is a great example of that. I'm convinced that SQS is not for developers to use on an application level but it is a service that allows infrastructure engineers to build complex and scalable environments on AWS. The other issue I always struggle with when using AWS is the cost thing. You never quite know how much you're going to pay at the end of the month. For small startups the difference between $500 and $1,000 is massive whereas for larger organisations the the difference between $15,000 and $20,000 isless of a problem.