“If it’s easy, it probably won’t scale. If it scales, it probably won’t be easy.”
Before I started working on a production-grade project during my internship, I used to wonder —
Why do big companies go through the pain of using complex cloud infrastructures like AWS, when we already have simple options like Render, Railway, and Vercel?
I was building and deploying MERN stack apps with just a few clicks. Platforms like Render and Vercel made things so smooth — connect your GitHub, set some environment variables, and your app is live in minutes.
There was no DevOps team involved. No scary IAM policies. No EC2 instances to babysit.
So again, why AWS?
🚀 The MVP Phase: When Simplicity Wins
Platforms like Render, Railway, and Vercel are a dream for solo developers, startups, and hackathon projects.
They offer:
- ⚡ Fast, frictionless deployments
- ✅ Free tiers and generous trial limits
- 🔁 Automatic CI/CD integration
- 🔒 SSL, HTTPS, and basic auth out of the box
They're perfect for:
- Side projects
- Portfolio demos
- Startup MVPs
- Quick PoCs for clients
And honestly? If you’ve never deployed a full-stack app in less than an hour using these, you’re missing out.
🏢 Then Comes the Real World
But then came my internship.
We were working on a platform that had:
- Thousands of users,
- Dynamic scaling requirements,
- Compliance concerns (data security, backups),
- API rate-limiting,
- Complex traffic patterns.
That’s when I realized:
Developer convenience ≠ Enterprise reliability.
Here’s what AWS brought to the table:
- Fine-grained access control (IAM)
- Private subnets & custom VPCs
- Load balancers, auto-scaling groups
- Centralized monitoring with CloudWatch
- Failover policies, disaster recovery
- Integration with dozens of services (S3, Lambda, RDS, etc.)
Yes, it was harder. But also, harder to break.
🧠 The Key Insight
Render and friends are fantastic — no doubt. But they abstract away the complexity because they assume you don’t need it.
AWS, on the other hand, gives you the steering wheel — and expects you to know how to drive.
In one scenario, I needed:
- Persistent logs across instances
- Horizontal scaling without cold starts
- Rollbacks with minimal downtime
Render couldn’t quite deliver that — AWS could.
📌 TL;DR — What I Learned
| Use Case | Recommended Platform |
|---|---|
| Hackathons / MVPs | Render, Railway, Vercel |
| Production-level systems | AWS (or GCP, Azure) |
| Deep DevOps learning | AWS all the way |
| Scale + Security Needs | AWS for the win |
👨💻 My Advice for Devs
- Start with Render/Vercel/Railway — build fast, learn fast.
- When it’s time to scale, or you want to understand real-world infra, jump into AWS.
- Don’t be afraid of complexity. Learn it bit by bit — it’s worth it.
There’s a reason the giants use it.
Top comments (3)
Render can deliver every single feature you listed on AWS and runs millions of production applications:
Are you sure you used Render and not ChatGPT to generate this article?
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and comment.
Honestly, it's surreal (and an honor) to have the founder of Render respond here — I truly appreciate it.
Just to clarify the intent: the article was written from a developer’s perspective, especially one who recently began working hands-on with production infrastructure at scale. It’s not meant to discredit Render in any way — in fact, I genuinely admire Render for its simplicity, strong developer experience, and smooth GUI. The speed and ease it brings to shipping apps is incredible, and for many use cases, it’s far more efficient than directly managing cloud infra like AWS.
That said, the post was meant to highlight the kind of granular control and manual exposure that platforms like AWS force you into — whether it’s configuring IAM roles, setting up custom VPCs, managing autoscaling groups, or designing network layers from scratch. While Render abstracts a lot of that complexity beautifully (and supports many production-ready features out of the box), the learning curve and control that comes with AWS was a significant shift for me, and that’s what I was trying to reflect on.
You’re absolutely right to point out that Render supports features like persistent logs, rollbacks, access controls, etc., and I might not have done justice to that in the post — I’ll make sure to update it for more clarity and fairness.
Again, appreciate you dropping in — and genuinely love what Render is doing for the developer community!
Thanks!