We have similar stories. We even brought in a devops consulting firm, who insisted on a pure AWS / Docker (ECS & co) stack. After a couple months of shocks, crises and occasional all-nighters, I just started deploying backup instances on Heroku, so that the QA and design teams wouldn't get blocked by the weekly clusterforks. After a few weeks of smooth sailing on that front, we just activated logging and auto scaling addons, and blessed the Heroku stack with the production domain name and CDN.
Heroku gets expensive quickly at scale, but the engineering required to make "the future" work on AWS was unmeasurable (because it never really succeeded for us).
I don't even know what to blame for the whole episode. Docker's incomplete architecture (2015)? AWS's inability to abstract and manage complexity into something that just works as described on their product pages? The consultants? Myself, for putting faith in that triad of unfamiliar but crucial people, services and products? Whatever, it's no longer a current problem for me.
Heroku gets expensive quickly at scale, but the engineering required to make "the future" work on AWS was unmeasurable (because it never really succeeded for us).
I don't even know what to blame for the whole episode. Docker's incomplete architecture (2015)? AWS's inability to abstract and manage complexity into something that just works as described on their product pages? The consultants? Myself, for putting faith in that triad of unfamiliar but crucial people, services and products? Whatever, it's no longer a current problem for me.