There was a fascinating Twitter thread on how to use the “good” parts of AWS, from an ex-AWS engineer:
https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1154516910265884672 . Click to expand the below image.
Bottom line: He recommends building your services to use AWS EC2, DynamoDB, etc but avoiding abstractions such as Lambda and API Gateway. There’s an interesting discussion on this thread on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20545561 .