While I don't know your situation your use case is understandable. It's just hard to watch such big tools serving up simple HTML with what could be a shell script or two running in cron.
Avoiding AWS based solutions to "not rely on others" is like using a kerosene lamp in the center of Manhattan. You may be more self sufficient, but.... why?
... as for self-sufficiency, why not? You're trading freedom and independence for serfdom in Amazon's little kingdom. They'll seduce you with shit exactly like this -- stringing together pointless, useless services to achieve an end that in actuality requires 999999999% less machinery than what they sold you -- to make sure your next project is with them and all their comfy little tools at something 2x to 3x the price. The collective knowledge of running servers represented by a federated, disparate group of specialists slowly drains away from public access, only to re-coalesce behind private walls to enrich a bunch of greedy, already-rich fucks instead of the general public. (You can already see this in the declining quality of google results for technical queries)
Meanwhile lots of good admin guys lose their jobs and the world of software development continues its transformation into a cesspool of spoiled brat devs begging, neigh CRYING for Bezos/Nadella/etc to wipe their ass for them.
Welcome to the future! I'll take my self-sufficiency...
Pointing at a service with 99.99% uptime and claim the outages as a reason to go elsewhere? Host it yourself and hit that same uptime target. I'll be impressed.
AWS isn't built for little static sites. It is built to host Amazon. And others likewise as big. The ability to do neat toys like this at a low cost, utilizing far more machinery than you would ever need to for such small project, is a happy byproduct.
> Meanwhile lots of good admin guys lose their jobs
Don't go all union-y on me! Frictional Unemployment is unavoidable. The reality is that services like AWS free up all those clearly intelligent (by virtue of being "good") admins to utilize their intellect elsewhere. We live in the age of the STEM shortage. If you can work a computer and can be described as "good", I won't worry for you.
> Pointing at a service with 99.99% uptime and claim the outages as a reason to go elsewhere? Host it yourself and hit that same uptime target. I'll be impressed.
Well, according to pingdom I hit 99.98% uptime with the dozen-or-so cheap little DO boxes I run for my firm's infrastructure. That's playing the dual roles of sole developer and sole support on those systems. My data pipeline collects records from hundreds of deployments worldwide, through all manner of diverse corporate IT environments. It really isn't that hard.
I'll agree with your points on frictional unemployment when the thing displacing them represents actual forward progress. AWS is a land grab, not progress.
And paying Amazon for the privilege of doing so!
Well done... golf clap