You know that book "JavaScript: The Good Parts"? There needs to be a similar one "AWS: just the good parts". It would probably talk about EC2 (VPS), S3 (cheap bulk storage), SES (emails), and that's about it. When folks get into the elastic-super-beanstalk-container-swarm-v0.3 products, that's when they really kill themselves on the bills.

That said, yes, just using a VPS vendor is the easy way to stick to the good parts.

AWS the Good Parts (a bit dated now): https://dvassallo.gumroad.com/l/aws-good-parts

I’ll argue that while wonky sometimes, ECS is pretty decent. Especially once you use fargate.

Obviously subjective, but Lambda seems more cost efficient than EC2. And really gives cloud vibes.

> "AWS: just the good parts"

I can't imagine a zero-page book selling well...

Remember? Your own comment tells us this is not a distant memory! It is still available! And a lot of people use it.

In other words, you have fully reserved compute. That's the way to avoid surprises, but certainly not the way to minimize costs for a large company.

You still can. My company rents space from Cogent communications, and they are very good at customer service, although the offering of "rent a cage and get a pipe" is a lot more DIY than AWS.

They also offer VPSes.