Why We Almost Always Go With AWS for Our Cloud Infrastructure Needs
We don't pick AWS because it's exciting. We pick it because it's boring in exactly the ways that matter, and the handful of times we've gone elsewhere taught us why.
Every few months a client asks us why we default to AWS instead of one of the newer, flashier cloud platforms. It's a fair question — there are genuinely interesting alternatives, and "we've always done it this way" is a bad reason to keep doing anything. So here's the actual reason, not the inertia answer.
It's Not About Being the Best. It's About Being Complete.
AWS isn't the cheapest option for every workload. It's not the simplest developer experience for every use case. Newer platforms often win on specific dimensions — faster deploys, nicer dashboards, more opinionated defaults that get you moving faster on day one.
What AWS has that almost nothing else has at the same depth: a service for nearly every infrastructure need we've ever hit, all interoperating within the same account, IAM system, and billing relationship. When a client project needs object storage, a relational database, a queue, a CDN, a serverless function, and a way to run scheduled jobs, AWS has a mature, battle-tested version of all six that talk to each other natively. Assembling the equivalent from six different specialized platforms is more work, more billing relationships, and more integration surface area for something to break.
The Talent Pool Is the Real Reason
Here's the reason that matters most for client work specifically: when we hand off a project, or when a client's internal team eventually takes over maintenance, AWS experience is the most common credential in the market. This isn't a claim about AWS being technically superior — it's a claim about hiring reality.
A client who needs to hire a developer to maintain their infrastructure six months after we've handed off the project has a much easier time finding someone who knows AWS than someone who knows a smaller, newer platform. This is genuinely one of the most important criteria in choosing infrastructure for client work, and it's the one that gets discussed the least, because it's not a technical debate — it's a labor market fact.
Documentation and Community Depth
AWS has been around long enough that nearly every problem we've hit has already been solved by someone else, publicly, with a Stack Overflow answer or a documented workaround. This matters more than it sounds like it should. The 2am debugging session where something is misconfigured is dramatically shorter when the error message is googleable and the fix is documented, versus a smaller platform where you're waiting on a support ticket or piecing together an answer from a sparse changelog.
Where We've Gone Elsewhere (And Why)
We're not dogmatic about this. A handful of client projects have gone with alternatives — usually because a specific requirement (a client's existing infrastructure, a specific compliance requirement, or a genuinely better fit for a narrow use case like static site hosting) made a different platform the right call. Static marketing sites often do better on platforms built specifically for that use case. Some clients come to us already committed to a specific cloud provider for organizational reasons that have nothing to do with our recommendation.
Those exceptions have taught us the actual lesson: the right infrastructure choice depends on the specific requirements of the project, not a blanket rule. AWS is our default because it's the right answer most of the time for the kind of work we do — full-stack applications for clients who need long-term maintainability and a large talent pool to draw from. It's not the right answer for every project, and treating it as an unquestioned default would be exactly the kind of mistake we try to avoid.
The Actual Takeaway
If you're choosing infrastructure for your own project: don't chase the platform with the best marketing or the most enthusiastic community right now. Ask who you'll be able to hire in two years, how well-documented the failure modes are, and whether the platform can grow with you without a painful migration. Boring and complete beats exciting and narrow for almost every business application we build.