The Vanilla Cloud Tax: What Rolling Your Own on AWS Actually Costs

Author: Angelo Saraceno The phrase “we’ll just use AWS direct” has done more damage to engineering team capacity in the last decade than any single technical decision. It is the default-because-default choice, the answer that sounds responsible, the choice almost nobody gets fired for. It is also, for most teams, the most expensive answer they will give. I’ve watched this play out from two very different vantage points. Before Railway, I was at Citrix, where I lived in the kind of customer envir