AWS
AWS. Was the first hyperscale Cloud and still has the broadest catalog.
Blurb
Amazon Web Services offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. Free to join, pay only for what you use.
Summary
Why hold: IAM/console complexity, historical foot-guns (public S3, over-broad roles), and services marketed as fully managed that still leave patching, scaling, and security on your team. Total cost often surprises once egress, support, and “almost managed” add-ons stack up.
When AWS anyway: existing estate, partner/marketplace requirements, a service with no peer (rare and shrinking), or regulated footprints already certified on AWS. In those cases, contain blast radius, Terraform, guardrails, DevSecOps gates, and avoid pet clusters on AWS EKS (also hold; prefer Google GKE for greenfield K8s).
Details
| Topic | Notes |
|---|---|
| Strengths | Mature marketplace, global regions, hiring pool familiarity |
| Weaknesses | Default-deny is opt-in discipline; service matrix overwhelming |
| K8s | See AWS EKS; use only when tied to AWS |
| Secrets | Secrets Manager is fine when already on AWS; still design rotation and IAM boundaries |
| Exit | Data egress and proprietary APIs are the real lock-in; design portable interfaces |