Public Cloud Pitfalls

Public clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP exist for a reason: they’re designed for convenience and agility. With services like Azure App Service or AWS Elastic Beanstalk, you don’t have to worry about setting up servers, networking, storage, patching, or even basic security. It’s all taken care of for you. That convenience is powerful especially if you just want to focus on coding.

This level of agility is game-changing for startups. It means you can test ideas fast, iterate, and move on if something doesn’t work, all without needing a dedicated ops team. It can also be a huge advantage for beginner developers who simply want to see their first “hello world” project live on the internet.

But just because the cloud is convenient and adopted by nearly all Fortune 500 companies, doesn’t mean you have to subscribe to the hype too. Let’s look at some common arguments in favor of public clouds and why they most likely won’t apply to your use case.

Argument 1: “It’s Scalable”

One of the biggest selling points of public clouds is scalability. In theory, you can go from a handful of users to thousands overnight. But the thing is most people won’t be hosting apps that get big overnight. In fact, most people won’t be hosting apps that get big at all. Locking yourself into a vendor just in case that unlikely event happens doesn’t make much sense, especially when your actual needs are small and steady.

Argument 2: “It’s Easy and Convenient”

Reiterating what I said in the intro paragraph of this page, public clouds win points for being easy and convenient. But in software, when something feels easy, it usually means you’re interacting with an abstraction hiding a lot of complexity underneath. That’s fine until your use case doesn’t fit the abstraction anymore. If you understand what’s happening under the hood, you can adjust and tweak things to your liking. With public clouds, progress can grind to a halt the moment you try to do something unexpected. At that point, you’re dealing with a black box that someone else built. If that box doesn’t expose the configuration you need, you’re stuck.

Argument 3: “It’s Everywhere”

Another common argument is that public clouds let you serve dynamic content with low latency across multiple regions. And to be honest, that’s true. If you actually need global reach, you’ll need a cloud. But let’s be real, you probably don’t. You’re most likely just trying to show off your projects to family, friends, or recruiters, all of whom are in the same region as you. The reality is that most people using public clouds don’t even take advantage of multi-region deployments anyway.

Argument 4: “You Only Pay for What You Use”

At least that’s the promise. In practice, figuring out what you actually need to use is harder than it sounds. Pricing models use units like DTUs or vCPUs that are hard to understand for beginners. I’ve personally paid for a database tier that was way overkill, but the lowest option was still more than I needed. I couldn’t understand how the units worked too. You can end up paying for performance you’ll never touch, so the “only pay for what you use” line doesn’t always hold up.