this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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Are you familiar with AWS? Amazon Web services. Many, many, websites use them and I don't think there's a way to tell as a user.
Like, you go to a website and their images are hosted on s3 (an aws service) and their database is on RDS (also AWS), and their whole backend application is using eks or ecs or whatever.
That's extremely common. Companies don't run their own hardware anymore very often.
Google and Microsoft have competing services, but those companies also suck. I think they're less popular, but I don't know much about why.
I'm not aware of any smaller competitors, though some probably exist. It would be a big risk for a company to go with a new provider. There's a lot of library support for the big players, for one thing. If you want your python application to talk to AWS, the boto library is just right there.
You could run your own hardware somewhere, but that has its own host of problems, if you'll pardon the pun. I worked somewhere a long time ago that had its own servers in a data center. The place got flooded in a big storm and we were down for a couple days.
I never understood the popularity of AWS. It's much cheaper using VPSs and even dedicated servers sometimes. I've worked on very cost-sensitive projects where I rolled our own highly-available k8s and postgres clusters on dedicated servers and VPSs and saved the company a shit load of money. Only used the "cloud" to store backups (Backblaze). There's tons of other options other than major "cloud" providers, and they're often much cheaper.