810 upvotes called AWS broken. Here's my take.

A post about leaving AWS hit 810 upvotes on Hacker News last week. The frustration in it is real and the writing is sharp. But most of the ten complaints disappear the moment you look at how the platform is actually supposed to be used.

A few of the author's takes and the short version of why I disagree:

On IAM

"IAM — the hideously complex auth and access rules system. This was invented by Lucifer sitting on his burning throne in the ninth level of Hell as the worst possible torment for those who have been sent below for using AWS."

The core model is three questions: who, what action, on which resource. Lucifer's off the hook.

On DynamoDB

"DynamoDB what a hot pile of garbage. I tried it and ended up with a $75USD bill by the end of the day."

I ran DynamoDB for a million users on a few hundred a month. The difference between that and $75-in-a-day is whether you run full-table Scans.

On Lambda

"There's simply no genuine benefit to AWS Lambda compared to running your own web servers… Keep convincing yourself that using AWS Lambda is not a horrible mistake."

On event-driven workloads, "horrible mistake" is the wrong framing. Cold starts are well under 0.1% of invocations in production.

🚀 Read the full version of all ten points →