This makes some good points about misuses of these AWS services, but the title is misleading. The article is actually more like "tempting but inadvisable use cases for AWS services".
My employer uses three of these heavily (ElastiCache, Kinesis and Lambda) and we get quite a bit of leverage out of them.
ElastiCache in particular surprised me. At first glance I mistook it for a transparent (and expensive) wrapper around sticking Redis on an EC2 instance, but if your usage is heavy enough to need multi-node clusters (e.g. read replicas or full Redis Cluster), its orchestration features are pretty useful. We can resize instances, fail over to a replica, and reshard clusters, with zero downtime, by clicking a button (or a one-line Terraform change). And never having to install security patches is nice too.
It certainly is expensive, though. (But if you're not willing to pay a premium for managed infra, what are you doing on AWS in the first place?)
My employer uses three of these heavily (ElastiCache, Kinesis and Lambda) and we get quite a bit of leverage out of them.
ElastiCache in particular surprised me. At first glance I mistook it for a transparent (and expensive) wrapper around sticking Redis on an EC2 instance, but if your usage is heavy enough to need multi-node clusters (e.g. read replicas or full Redis Cluster), its orchestration features are pretty useful. We can resize instances, fail over to a replica, and reshard clusters, with zero downtime, by clicking a button (or a one-line Terraform change). And never having to install security patches is nice too.
It certainly is expensive, though. (But if you're not willing to pay a premium for managed infra, what are you doing on AWS in the first place?)