AWS Bites

43. When is it OK to cheat on AWS?

Jun 30 '22

We do love AWS, but sometimes we have to admit that it’s not always a silver bullet. There are definitely use cases where it might be worth considering alternatives to AWS.

In this episode we will discuss some of these use cases and try to highlight what are the advantages that other platforms or services can have over AWS in very specific circumstances. First of all we clarify why we like AWS and why (and when) it’s worth sticking with it. Then, we discuss what are some of the reasons why it might be worth considering alternatives to AWS. At this point we go into the specifics and talk about authentication services (Auth0), search services (ElasticSearch, Algolia), CDN Services (GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel, CloudFlare, Fastly, Akamai), Databases (MongoDB Atlas, Digital Ocean managed databases, IBM Compose, CloudFlare D1, Upstash, Confluent Kafka), Headless CMS services (ContentFul, Storyful, AirTable, Google Spreadsheet), Virtual Machine services (Digital Ocean, Linode).

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

- Episode 3. "How do you deploy a static website on AWS?”: https://awsbites.com/3-how-do-you-deploy-a-static-website-on-aws/

- Auth0: https://auth0.com/

- Amazon OpenSearch: https://aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/the-elk-stack/what-is-opensearch/

- Elastic Cloud: https://www.elastic.co/cloud/

- Algolia: https://www.algolia.com/

- Vercel: https://vercel.com/

- Netlify: https://www.netlify.com/

- MongoDB Atlas: https://www.mongodb.com/atlas/database

- Digital Ocean managed database: https://try.digitalocean.com/managed-databases/

- Compose (now IBM Cloud Databases): https://www.compose.com/

- Upstash: https://upstash.com/

- Confluent: https://www.confluent.io/