[matus_congrady]

(Please take my opinion with a grain of salt, as I might be biased - I'm a founder at a startup that solves a very similar problem).

The cloud (and by "cloud" I mostly mean AWS) in general is indeed insanely complex. Not only is it complex and hard to use for dedicated and trained DevOps/Cloud experts, it's even more overwhelming for developers wanting to just deploy their simple apps.

This statement is in my opinion almost universaly accepted - during our market research, we've interviewed ~150 DevOps/Cloud experts and ~250 developers that have been using AWS. Only ~2.5% of them have said that the complexity of AWS is not an issue for them.

That being said, I understand that AWS has to be complex by design. Not only it offers ~250 different services, but the flexible/configurable way it's designed simply requires a lot of expertise and configuration. For example, the granularity and capabilities of AWS IAM is unparalelled. But it comes at a cost - the configurational and architectural complexity is just beyond what an average AWS user is willing to accept.

An alternative to the cloud complexity are the PaaS platforms (such as Heroku or Render). But they also have their disadvantages - mostly significantly increased costs, lower flexibility and far less supported use-cases.

At https://stacktape.com, we're developing an abstraction over AWS, that is simple enough so that any developer can use it, yet allows to configure/extend anything you might need for complex applications. Stacktape is like a PaaS platform that deploys applications/infrastructure to your own AWS account.

We believe that Stacktape offers the perfect mix of ease-of-use, productivity, cost-efficiency and flexibility. It can be used to deploy anything from side projects to complex enterprise applications.

I'll be very happy to hear your thoughts or to hear any feedback.

[nathants]

those 150 cloud experts have a serious conflict of interest wrt cloud complexity.

those 250 developers are likely entrapped by the cloud experts.

this is fine, and is a rich market that should be served.

regardless, perceived complexity or generated complexity are not the same as actual complexity. all of these complexities are real, some are optional.