Do I need AWS?

You don’t need it. You never did. If you think you do, that’s not engineering—it’s Stockholm syndrome with a credit card attached.

AWS isn’t infrastructure; it’s a casino with APIs. Bright lights, thick manuals, and every lever costs money in ways that only become clear once accounting starts screaming.

AWS sells complexity as a feature. Need a server? Choose from a zoo of instance families, pricing models, regions, and footnotes.

Lock-in is the quiet part. Every “managed service” is a velvet-lined trap.

Costs arrive as surprises: egress, cross-zone traffic, API calls, logs, metrics.

Most websites need boring servers. That problem was solved years ago.

AWS is what happens when fear is productized.