for a startup, I suspect that this is mostly wrong advice. Yes, don't yak shave and re-invent things, be cost sensitive, but to exclude the cloud is silly. >

for a startup, I suspect that this is mostly wrong advice. Yes, don't yak shave and re-invent things, be cost sensitive, but to exclude the cloud is silly. > RDS. It’s slow and super expensive. I don’t want to worry about one-off queries or migrations. If you use only 5% of your server capacity you can afford to do inefficient things at times. It is expensive. But so is a shitty database thats not backed up, and cant be recovered. The inbuilt security that can come from RDS is a really really good thing, and is worth its weight in not having a DBA. > Identity management. You don’t need it. total bullshit. But its better to use a google domain for that. SSO for all the things. > S3. Unless you store a massive amount of data you don’t need it. No. even as a reformed storage admin, S3 has its place. Yes its shit, yes its slow, but it works for a lot of web based things. The crucial thing is for small amounts of data accessed by lots of things, S3 is actually reasonable. coupled with decent access controls and ephemeral keys, its a goodish build artifact store. And don't overestimate the value of an S3 website. It is utterly shit for fast read/writes of large files. Or if you are editing a file in place. Its also fucking expensive for large amounts of data. but it has its place. > Lambda? Beanstalk? Glacier? EBS? What even is all this stuff. Lambda: CGI-BIN but with a docker twist. Beanstalk: dont ever touch it, its shit Glacier: an expensive way to ignore your data, but cheaper than ignoring it on S3 EBS: Hard drives on demand. For anything that is experimental, or subject to change, or development, the cloud is a good fit. If you are doing stuff that involves non burstable CPU/disk heavy stuff, then its less of a good fit. However I don't think now I'd ever go entirely one way or the other. I'd always have some physical kit I own, or services I'd buy from the cloud.