Like OP, I was an AWS booster for many years (also a Heroku lover), but fell out of love about 10 years ago for the same reasons.
- It felt like far too much complexity just to do simple things.
- The obvious attempts to trap customers with slightly incompatible, higher level services felt gross
- The inability to run AWS trash on a dev machine had a MASSIVE hit on productivity
- Pricing didn't fall as fast as I felt it should (an obviously debatable position that reasonable, smart folks disagree with)
In my current company, we've been running basic SMB/tech startup functions on-prem (ACK! THE HORROR!) from ~6 basic computers (4 game machines and 2 nucs) for a few years now.
We just reconstituted the entire infra working part-time over about 2 weeks using Claude code and ansible.
It really doesn't make sense in this world to pay tens of thousands of dollars to rent a level of computation that can be purchased and managed for a tiny fraction of that money.
We're also seeing massive dividends paying out with this architecture because we have self-hosted gitea, along with a local workstation for our agents to run in, and now our agents have all of the context without us relying on Github or ingress/egress fees at all.
The value in paying someone is if you have enterprise requirements for physical data security. Then after that if you go the Hetzner route, you have to micromanage your underlying OS, Redis, DB, etc... and it's just more work.. and if you're in enterprise business it reduces friction a lot to just pay someone a trivial amount like $10,000 a month.
I honestly can't believe most of the people posting aren't engineers or they work at small companies or something. They show their lack of experience when talking about how cheap Hetzner and DO are.
- It felt like far too much complexity just to do simple things.
- The obvious attempts to trap customers with slightly incompatible, higher level services felt gross
- The inability to run AWS trash on a dev machine had a MASSIVE hit on productivity
- Pricing didn't fall as fast as I felt it should (an obviously debatable position that reasonable, smart folks disagree with)
In my current company, we've been running basic SMB/tech startup functions on-prem (ACK! THE HORROR!) from ~6 basic computers (4 game machines and 2 nucs) for a few years now.
We just reconstituted the entire infra working part-time over about 2 weeks using Claude code and ansible.
It really doesn't make sense in this world to pay tens of thousands of dollars to rent a level of computation that can be purchased and managed for a tiny fraction of that money.
We're also seeing massive dividends paying out with this architecture because we have self-hosted gitea, along with a local workstation for our agents to run in, and now our agents have all of the context without us relying on Github or ingress/egress fees at all.
[edited for formatting only]