Amazon Web Services
Amazon's cloud computing platform offering compute, storage, databases and many managed services.
HN commenters reach for it as a trusted default that works fairly well,123 and value its help with compliance, such as GDPR and the Nitro guarantee that AWS staff cannot access customer data.45 The most common complaint is outages, from us-east-1 failures to the long-disrupted Bahrain and UAE regions;678910 others cite unpredictable bills and a messy console.11121314
Why people recommend it
Trusted default · 3
Commenters use it as a reliable base for their apps and stacks and trust it as the market leader.
“It runs on AWS and works fairly well.”
“We use their services cause we can trust that they know what they are doing.”
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“Stack I reach for: Python, TypeScript, AWS, Docker, PostgreSQL, Grafana stack, OpenTelemetry, MCP”
Compliance and privacy · 2
Commenters say it can take on much of the GDPR compliance work and that AWS staff cannot access data on Nitro instances.
“there's also a very simple solution that is to deploy on AWS and let AWS handle the heavy workload”
“AWS personnel do not have access to Your Content on AWS Nitro System EC2 instances”
Spending cap · 1
A commenter notes AWS is rolling out a hard cap on spending.
“AWS is finally rolling out a feature that lets you put a hard cap on spending.”
Engineering guidance · 1
A commenter calls an AWS article on timeouts, retries and backoff the best explanation they have seen.
“This is probably the best and most thorough explanation I’ve seen”
Caveats and dissent
Outages · 3
Commenters say outages happen often and that us-east-1 failures have caused global outages.
“AWS us-east-1 outages have caused global outages on multiple occasions”
“it was pretty well documented as a control plane failure in us-east-1”
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“Compare to Github, Microsoft, Salesforce, and AWS outages that are always occurring in some fashion”
Regional data loss · 3
Commenters say attacks on the Bahrain and UAE regions caused lasting disruption and data that could not be recovered without paid backups.
“Recent Iranian attacks on AWS locations in Bahrain resulted in loss of data that simply could not be recovered.”
“me-south-01 (Bahrain) appears to be gone permanently”
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“All the UAE/Bahrain services have been disrupted since March/April”
Unpredictable billing · 3
Commenters say costs are hard to predict and bills can jump without warning.
“I still had no idea what anything would cost. At some point it just became clear to me that they intentionally designed it this way”
“stay away from cloud services especially AWS because it's hard to reason about where it will come from”
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“Just because AWS is a failure in this regard, doesn't mean there aren't alternatives with fixed prices”
Billing console errors · 2
A billing console incident showed some users estimated bills in the billions.
“Thanks for the heart attack, Amazon!”
“Yes, I've got an estimated bill of $4bn”
Messy console · 3
Commenters find the web console confusing and slow, with awkward logins and region switching.
“It's really in top 5 messy UI i have ever seen.”
“For any horrible web administration UI:”
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“Do you feel scared and alone when opening the AWS console?”
Docs and support · 2
Commenters call the documentation a maze, and one says most of their support tickets were never fixed.
“I've always referred to AWS documentation as a maze of misdirection.”
“I've filed my share of AWS tickets but ultimately most of them ended up not fixed by AWS”
Often compared with
1 moved from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure
3 moved from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud Platform
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026) 15 mentions
- I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left 14 mentions
- Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026) 11 mentions
- Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026) 10 mentions
- Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026) 10 mentions
- Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2026) 8 mentions
Also written as Amazon Web Services. Data: amazon-web-services.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 45
“I've always referred to AWS documentation as a maze of misdirection.”
“AWS personnel do not have access to Your Content on AWS Nitro System EC2 instances”
“it was pretty well documented as a control plane failure in us-east-1”
Exactly. I use this stuff at work, but why would I ever risk this for my own stuff ?
“I've filed my share of AWS tickets but ultimately most of them ended up not fixed by AWS”
“AWS us-east-1 outages have caused global outages on multiple occasions”
“there's also a very simple solution that is to deploy on AWS and let AWS handle the heavy workload”
“AWS (ECS/Fargate, RDS, Lambda, S3)”
“me-south-01 (Bahrain) appears to be gone permanently”
“I prefer it to aws for personal projects”
“AWS”
“Same for AWS Bahrain”
“As someone with an existing personal AWS account”
“AWS is finally rolling out a feature that lets you put a hard cap on spending.”
“AWS, Azure, Docker, CI/CD”
“designed and deployed a HIPAA-compliant regionally-isolated global AWS platform”
“stay away from cloud services especially AWS because it's hard to reason about where it will come from”
“AWS”
“It's really in top 5 messy UI i have ever seen.”
“they pause your access but don't delete your data for a 90 day grace period”
“Infra - CloudFlare - AWS - Terraform”
“backend (Node, Supabase, Vercel, AWS)”
“AWS”
“AWS, Azure, GCP”
“Neon, Cloudflare, Docker, AWS”
“Amazon Web Services”
“extensive AWS experience”
“The new AWS signup experience now lets devs build until their credits run out”
“Recent Iranian attacks on AWS locations in Bahrain resulted in loss of data that simply could not be recovered.”
“It runs on AWS and works fairly well.”
“Those cloud hosts like AWS have infrastructure in the UK”
“Compare to Github, Microsoft, Salesforce, and AWS outages that are always occurring in some fashion”
“Even just one American company like AWS could turn off a huge chunk of European economies.”
“deploying a multi-region AWS environment”
“Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS, React, Node.js”
“The backend was NestJS on MySQL/MongoDB/Redis, deployed on AWS”
“AWS with Pulumi IaC”
“Cut $444k out of a Glacier bill covering 2.6 PB of objects”
“AWS, Docker”
“Do you feel scared and alone when opening the AWS console?”
“For any horrible web administration UI:”
“Stack I reach for: Python, TypeScript, AWS, Docker, PostgreSQL, Grafana stack, OpenTelemetry, MCP”
“All the UAE/Bahrain services have been disrupted since March/April”
“I still had no idea what anything would cost. At some point it just became clear to me that they intentionally designed it this way”
“We use their services cause we can trust that they know what they are doing.”