I recently got acquainted with AWS through work, and DigitalOcean (DO) through a side project. These are a few miscellaneous thoughts. I'm curious if my instinct is right, or people have experiences that say otherwise:
- DigitalOcean (DO) is less "bloated" than AWS. I see about 10 total services that can be managed on the left hand side. I only need about 3 or 4 to run my small website, and a side project I'm developing. On the other hand, AWS has what appears to be hundreds of services, each with similar-sounding names. RDS, ECS, EC2, IAM - I know relevant acronyms now, but boy is it confusing when someone just tosses a new one in during a meeting and it's a scramble to decode what they're saying. Also, the project in AWS at work uses about 10 of those services, much more than my scrappy side project.
- AWS is far more configurable than DO. My concern with using DO is that the abstraction layer may be too opaque, obfuscating core utilities in an attempt to induce "vendor-lock". I still think this is true, but perhaps this is ok for a small project (web application) versus a highly-specific client project.
- It's less painful for your pocket to prototype with DO. So far, for about two weeks of screwing around in DO, activating services I don't need, running droplets (servers) way too inefficiently, the price has been...7 dollars and 26 cents. My suspicion is that my bill would have been much higher in AWS.
Does any of this track so far?
