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I’ve led infrastructure at a startup for the past 4 years that has had to scale quickly. From the beginning I made some core decisions that the company has had to stick to, for better or worse, these past four years. This post will list some of the major decisions made and if I endorse them for your startup, or if I regret them and advise you to pick something else.
AWS Link to heading
Picking AWS over Google Cloud Link to heading
🟩 Endorse
Early on, we were using both GCP and AWS. During that time, I had no idea who my “account manager” was for Google Cloud, while at the same time I had regular cadence meetings with our AWS account manager. There is a feel that Google lives on robots and automation, while Amazon lives with a customer focus. This support has helped us when evaluating new AWS services. Besides support, AWS has done a great job around stability and minimizing backwards incompatible API changes.
There was a time when Google Cloud was the choice for Kubernetes clusters, especially when there was ambiguity around if AWS would invest in EKS over ECS. Now though, with all the extra Kubernetes integrations around AWS services (external-dns, external-secrets, etc), this is not much of any issue anymore.
🟩 Endorse
Unless you’re penny-pinching (and your time is free), there’s no reason to run your own control plane rather than use EKS. The main advantage of using an alternative in AWS, like ECS, is the deep integration into AWS services. Luckily, Kubernetes has caught up in many ways: for example, using external-dns to integrate with Route53.
🟧 Regret
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