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AWS isn't aimed at regular people, it's infrastructure as a service. You use it because you need a thousand servers, or a redundant system that can survive a da

AWS isn't aimed at regular people, it's infrastructure as a service. You use it because you need a thousand servers, or a redundant system that can survive a data centre exploding. If you just need a single server that you don't care about then it's way cheaper to just own it yourself. You probably don't need 99.999999999999999% guarantees for your data, but if you're a bank then you do need those guarantees because losing all of your documents would be disastrous. Normal people aren't worth anything to them. A company might spend a million a month with AWS, to get that with normal people you'd need at least a hundred thousand customers. And those people are going to spam you with tickets and do silly or illegal things. They're just not worth it. They obviously won't turn money down, but it's not a growth area for them.

epistasis 25d ago
I 99% agree, but have conflicted felings. There's a mix of services. S3 is and was an amazing resource for normal people. Extremely reliable cloud storage for backup, for distribution, for anything, well, it's a dream. I prefer Cloudflare's offering there in every way, but AWS defined the product category (with its correspondingly ugly API like every single AWS service), and met a core need for many many people. With S3, if you need a ton of storage, it's a terrible deal, and you shouldn't use it. But for a couple hundred gigabytes, go for it. EC2 is similarly great for normal people as long as you only need a part-time server for a short amount of time. It's hard to beat with a VPS. Once you get into load balances, event queues, and all the rest of AWS services, well, that's all there to drive lots of money to AWS and to contractors and busy work. MAYBE RDS is a good deal for somebody who really wants to pay somebody else for a managed database. Which turns out to be a ton of users of databases!
tjoff 25d ago
Cargo culting is probably the biggest reason people use AWS.

epistasis 25d ago

I 99% agree, but have conflicted felings. There's a mix of services. S3 is and was an amazing resource for normal people. Extremely reliable cloud storage for backup, for distribution, for anything, well, it's a dream. I prefer Cloudflare's offering there in every way, but AWS defined the product category (with its correspondingly ugly API like every single AWS service), and met a core need for many many people. With S3, if you need a ton of storage, it's a terrible deal, and you shouldn't use it. But for a couple hundred gigabytes, go for it. EC2 is similarly great for normal people as long as you only need a part-time server for a short amount of time. It's hard to beat with a VPS. Once you get into load balances, event queues, and all the rest of AWS services, well, that's all there to drive lots of money to AWS and to contractors and busy work. MAYBE RDS is a good deal for somebody who really wants to pay somebody else for a managed database. Which turns out to be a ton of users of databases!

tjoff 25d ago

Cargo culting is probably the biggest reason people use AWS.