AWS has a fine stack for deploying "cloud native" apps on top of EC2 instances. Build a base AMI using Packer and launch it to an Auto Scaling Group behind a l

AWS has a fine stack for deploying "cloud native" apps on top of EC2 instances. Build a base AMI using Packer and launch it to an Auto Scaling Group behind a load balancer. Deploy code to the ASG using CodeDeploy. Use RDS for the database. This is a good match for languages that have good concurrency like Elixir. They benefit from deploying to big machines that have a lot of CPU cores, and keeping a common in-memory cache on the EC2 instance is more efficient than using an external cache like Elasticache. It also works well for resource-hungry systems with poor concurrency like Ruby on Rails. Putting these kinds of apps into big containers is just a waste of money. Here is a complete example of that architecture using Terraform: https://github.com/cogini/multi-env-deploy https://github.com/cogini/multi-env-deploy Similarly, bare metal can be really cost-effective. For $115/month, I can get a dedicated server with 24 VCPU cores (2x Intel Hexa-Core Xeon E5-2620 CPU), 64 GB RAM, 4x8 TB SATA, 30 TB traffic (see https://www.leaseweb.com/dedicated-servers#NL https://www.leaseweb.com/dedicated-servers#NL). That would be an order of magnitude more expensive on AWS with containers.