I put a lot of work into understanding AWS and gave it an honest try for 6 months or so, and ended up realizing it's an approach to solving a problem that simply doesn't jive with me. I went back to DO, and it made both personal sense for me and economic sense for the product.
It's obviously an incredible platform with excellent tooling, and it probably powers most of the websites I use. But like most trades the same job can be done to a similar standard at a variety of scales using wildly different processes and tooling. And that's fine. The economics seem to be inverted (AWS is large scale and quite expensive in my experience while DO is smaller and cheaper), but it's also not a perfect analogy. I just won't begrudge anyone for using a tool or process I don't love. If it gets your blog or multi-million dollar revenue product online, that's awesome.
I'm glad I can say I used some AWS stuff on my resume, but for my own work I'd only use it if it had a clear advantage over whatever else I'm using.
It's obviously an incredible platform with excellent tooling, and it probably powers most of the websites I use. But like most trades the same job can be done to a similar standard at a variety of scales using wildly different processes and tooling. And that's fine. The economics seem to be inverted (AWS is large scale and quite expensive in my experience while DO is smaller and cheaper), but it's also not a perfect analogy. I just won't begrudge anyone for using a tool or process I don't love. If it gets your blog or multi-million dollar revenue product online, that's awesome.
I'm glad I can say I used some AWS stuff on my resume, but for my own work I'd only use it if it had a clear advantage over whatever else I'm using.