[ezrast]

Another article that, by the third sentence, namedrops seven different AWS services they want to build their app on and then spends the rest of the argument pretending like that ecosystem has zero in-built complexity. My friend, each one of those services has its own security model, limitations, footguns, and interoperability issues that you have to learn about independently. And you don't even mention any of the operational services like CloudWatch, CloudTrail, VPCs (even serverless, you'll need them if you want your lambdas to hit certain other services efficiently), and so on. Those are not remotely free. Your "real developers" can't figure out how to write a YAML document, but you trust them to manage infrastructure-as-code for motherloving API Gateway? Absolutely wild.

Kubernetes and AWS are both complex, but one of them frontloads all the complexity because it's free software written by infrastructure dorks, and one of them backloads all of it because it's a business whose model involves minimizing barriers to entry so that they can spring all the real costs on you once you're locked in. That doesn't mean either one is a better or worse technical solution to whatever specific problem you have, but it does make it really easy to make the wrong choice if you don't know what you're getting into.

As for the last point, I don't discourage serverless solutions because they make less work for me, I do it because they make more. The moment the developers decide they want any kind of consistency across deployments, I'm stuck writing or rewriting a bunch of Terraform and CI/CD pipelines for people who didn't think very hard about what they were doing the first time. They got a PoC working in half an hour clicking around the AWS console, fell in love, and then handed it to someone else to figure out esoterica like "TLS termination" and "logs" and "not making all your S3 buckets public by accident."

[moltar]

I can do all of the stacks well, including serverless described or pure ECS Fargate or Kubernetes.

From my experience Kubernetes is the most complex with most foot guns and most churn.

[cybrox]

Is it? If you compare to serverless, you'd almost have to compare AWS EKS Fargate and with that, there's a lot less operational overload. You still have to learn ingress, logging, networking, etc. but you'd have to do that with serverless as well.

I'd argue between AWS serverless and AWS EKS fargate, the initial complexity is about the same. But serverless is a lot harder to scale cost efficiently and not accidentally go wild with function or sns loops.