Why I'm moving my side project from Vercel to AWS

TLDR: I like to waste time and use AWS for trying to save $20 🤣

[WebDevCody]

Just to clear things up, aws has an option to click through their amplify dashboard for deploying your next application and connecting it to auto deploy on pushes to your git repo.

What I’m doing in this video is more complex and probably unnecessary for a small side project. I’m a fan of decoupling the code from the deployment, creating automated ci/cd pipelines, infrastructure as code, etc. if you just want to write code and have it deploy, amplify, netlify, railway, fly.io, etc are all good options.

[ricko]

I've always avoided using AWS because I feel overwhelmed by the huge amount of configurations it has. And I'm scared I'll end up getting charged $5000 just for accidentally configuring something I shouldn't have

[FelipeRodrigues-zhgx]

Would love if you could make some kind of tutorial series going from: creating your next.js application (just a blanket application as example) to deploying on amazon like this. Anyway, thanks for the video!

[focusotter]

Hey! Focus Otter here from the AWS AppSync team, formerly Amplify team 👋 Would love to hop on stream or just a general chat to show how Amplify can streamline this process. While it's possible to do it the way you showed in the video, it's not the recommended way and can be streamlined in a comparable way to Vercel (without the $20/month charge, and without Serverless framework).

[rustystrings]

I am a software engineer at a large enterprise, I use AWS on a daily basis to power a mobile app that had 200, 000 active users last month. I'm about to do nearly the same thing you're doing here with all these services to deploy a web app soon, which will have double if not triple the traffic. Learning AWS, becoming a solutions architect and actually using all the services has increased the possibilities for me to build anything there.

[PASTRAMIKick]

my rule is that if I'm doing something for mostly learning and the harder alternative has benefits, I will always go for the harder stuff, I learn more and in this case save some cash, thanks for the insight.

[DamirSecki]

done this couple of times over the year and lost my mind how mind bogglingly complicated AWS deployment is... and then connect the emails, DKIMs, etc... oh my dear.... when I learned about vercel and tried it out.... I prefer paying $100 pm (even though I pay only $20 - for many project within the same user)... since my hour of time is worth much more... and my piece of mind... VERCEL ftw! So glad it exists and is easy to do anything... just works!

[Drackomass]

I know it wasn't the focus of the video but the first few mins you spent breaking down the pricing for vercel was so good. I really enjoyed that and learnt something for my own stuff as well.

[pwbandwidth]

I always preach Terraform to people for this reason. Why click through an endless sea of GUIs (especially as a complete beginner), when you can just pull down somebody's template, fill in some variables, run terraform apply, and just have it set all this up for you? It's really great, and I'd recommend everybody learn some Infrastructure as Code tool, it will save you so much time especially as you build confidence with it.

[mprync]

My TLDR; Time is FAR more valuable than money.

The TLDR in your description is pretty accurate for this video :D. If you value $20 more than days of work and configuration, then this approach will definitely suit you, and the maintenance of it amounting to many man hours + an extra few people to hire (DevOps) costing magnitudes more than $20 lol.

Vercel's "per user" billing is related to users who can access your Vercel dashboard, and not developers actively coding on the nextjs app. It is per user because Vercel gives you analytics and metrics out the box, these things aren't free to serve a whole team of people, especially querying that data manually, which they allow. $20 is literally nothing to anyone in our profession. $20 for a nice, fast and responsive observability dashboard for all my apps? No problem from me.

The actual problem is the bandwidth pricing, it's pretty high compared to AWS but lets be real, the magnitudes of convenience and time saved (i.e man hours) managing your infra, I think the cost is more than reasonable.

If you did all this yourself on AWS, you will be paying more to hire people to maintain it all if you factor in everything detail of time / money with hiring etc. If you don't hire people to save money, you'll never get to market in time. Its all a balancing act.

[rainxr]

1:35 when vercel says $20/user/month, that's per user that has access to the vercel dashboard and is allowed to do stuff on it, not user of your app. usage limits etc are completely independent and are found by scrolling on that page, the free tier has 100GB of bandwidth, vs the Pro tier that has 1TB of bandwidth included. if you're not pulling 100gb you only need to go pro as you said if you're hosting a commercial app (and care about breaking their TOS)

2:35 if you're using more than 1TB of bandwidth you get charged $40 per extra 100gb, which is also on the usage limits section of that page if you scroll down, no need to contact sales. it does seem a little pricey though say if you're pulling 1.5TB it's $220. a cost comparison with AWS would be nice, though since vercel is using AWS under the hood (their cloud prodict is just a fancy devops company on top of it really) I can't imagine it'd be too different, but maybe it is? again that'd be something that'd've been nice in a "vercel vs aws" video

[djosefandersson]

Thanks! Am I alone who using simple VDS + Nginx for this simple homepages.?
- No worries about huge cost
- Host multiple website to share the fix cost
- No booting time for lambda function
For sure, all this is not intended to be scaled, like simple homepages :-)

[cas]

We wanted to use Vercel at my previous company till they told us we are looking at 33k a year. We brought it in house into Azure. Saved a ton and now I also use aws for everything

[Val-tfnx]

I ended up moving from Vercel to Railway because of this "non-commercial" thingy, and I'm happy so far. It gives you $5 credit each month, you pay if only it goes beyond that. Perfect for small business websites.

[EddyVinck]

I've been learning AWS for similar reasons. Currently chipping away at a web scraping project!

[cas]

Amplify also has first class support for Next and Next 13. You can go pretty far with just the amplify CLI. They also have a amplify studio which is a web GUI to manage all that for you. Looks similar to fire base

[omomer]

Lol the echo WTf thing is perhaps the single most relatable thing i have seen on any coding channel lol, 😅

[Kevin-flrn]

Amazon looks so complex. Would love to see a beginner walkthrough with deploying a full stack app

[basarat]

Worth noting : Lots of companies (including some of my employers) use serverless. It might not be perfect. But its hella better than "without" 🌹

[xellestar]

I do all this stuff on aws to serve mostly static websites. One tip is not to use amplify and just go straight to cdk. Curious how a nextjs backend might work on something like a lambda rather than a persistant infrastructure like ec2.