Corey Quinn (who is hilarious, btw) finally realized what I’ve known since the first time I tried shipping a Rails app on EC2: AWS, for the uninitiated, is pure pain:

Recently, I was spinning up yet another terribly coded thing for fun because I believe in making my problems everyone else’s problems, and realized something that had been nagging at me for a while: working with AWS is relatively painful.

Corey lays out what a typical zero-to-one AWS setup often requires, then compares it to the silky smooth experience Vercel provides on top of AWS. His explanation for the discrepancy: it’s generational

This feels generational to me. For folks of a certain age (Gen X and Millenials), AWS and GCP have made their bones. We came of technical age with the platforms and we’re used to their foibles. Azure is of course the Boomer Cloud, but Gen Z is using platforms that aren’t designed as tests of skill to let customers prove how much they want something.

Hat tip to Cory for calling Azure the “Boomer Cloud”. That’s amazing. However, I don’t think this is a generational thing. There’s an entire group of elder devs, like myself, who have always preferred Heroku-style deployment platforms over AWS.

While his view of the past seems skewed from inside the AWS bubble, he might be right about the future:

AWS spent two decades building the most powerful cloud platform in the world. They may spend the next two watching it become irrelevant to anyone who wasn’t already bought in.