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chickensongyesterday at 10:30 PM2 repliesview on HN

> specifically speaking about aws, the predictions vs what actually happened is a massive gap

I guess I'm one of the people who disagree, specifically about AWS. I think a lot of companies just watch their bill go up because they don't have the appetite to unwind their previous decision to go all-in on AWS.

Ignoring egress fees, migrating storage and compute isn't hard, it's all the auxiliary stuff that's locked in, the IAM, Cognito, CloudFormation, EventBridge, etc... Good luck digging out of that hole. That's not to say that AWS doesn't work well, but unless you have a light footprint and avoided most of their extra services, the lock-in feels pretty real.

That's what it feels like Anthropic is doing here. You could have a cron job under your control, or you could outsource that to a Claude Routine. At some point the outsourced provider has so many hooks into your operations that it's too painful to extract yourself, so you just keep the status quo, even if there's pain.


Replies

JohnMakinyesterday at 10:46 PM

the AWS things you mentioned you don’t need to mess with at all, with the exception of IAM, which doesn’t cost anything at all.

your experience just hasn’t been my experience I guess. The more managed the service you use, the more costs you are going to pay - for a very long time I’ve got by with paying for compute, network, and storage on the barebones services. If you want to pay for convenience you will pay for it.

One area that was a little shitty that has changed a lot is egress costs, but we mostly have shifted to engineering around it. I’ve never minded all that much, and AWS support is so good at enterprise tiers that they’ll literally help you do it.

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ElFitzyesterday at 11:20 PM

I am curious, what do people use Cognito for? I’ve never not ended up regretting using it.

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