Having scaled up various business initiatives, and working through countless scaling issues, I would recommend managed services like anyone else with experience...
However! When I spin up my own side projects. It is sooo much easier to just go into the command line and spin something up directly --- it does make me wonder whether some small amount of expertise can really change things. By the time your orchestrating AWS services, docker containers, kubernetes and more --- Would it have been so bad to run a 10 line bash script on few cheap VMs to set yourself up?
Even typing that, I realize how much time managed services saves you when you need it. Change management is really what those services offer you - even if a momentary setup is easier by hand.
I totally agree. I recently set up a service using docker, terraform, and AWS fargate. It was interesting, but everything felt like such an abstraction. Firing up a VM and running the app would have taken me as little as 10 minutes vs a multiple day research project. Or using ansible would have taken maybe a couple hours.
However! When I spin up my own side projects. It is sooo much easier to just go into the command line and spin something up directly --- it does make me wonder whether some small amount of expertise can really change things. By the time your orchestrating AWS services, docker containers, kubernetes and more --- Would it have been so bad to run a 10 line bash script on few cheap VMs to set yourself up?
Even typing that, I realize how much time managed services saves you when you need it. Change management is really what those services offer you - even if a momentary setup is easier by hand.