When designing platforms in the AWS cloud, it's tempting to follow established patterns or replicate approaches used by others in the industry. After all, if it works for them, it should work for you, right? 🤔

💡 "If you’re going to be really successful in this business, you have to be contrarian—and right." – Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital.

Some of the most innovative and cost-effective solutions come from embracing contrarianism—challenging common assumptions and rethinking "standard" practices.

Here’s how contrarian thinking can elevate your platform:

• 🌐 Rethink “global” architectures
  Many assume a global presence requires a multi-region deployment from day one. But is the added complexity justified for your use case? For example, you might achieve high availability more efficiently with a well-architected single-region setup using services like Amazon Aurora Global Database or AWS Backup across regions.
• 💡 Challenge the need for microservices
  Microservices are celebrated, but are they right for your workloads? If your team isn’t prepared for the operational overhead, consider a monolithic approach with strong modular boundaries. Platforms like AWS Lambda or ECS can still provide agility without unnecessary fragmentation.
• 💰 Embrace spot instances in clusters
  AWS spot instances can reduce compute costs by typically 75%, yet many shy away due to perceived risks of interruptions. By designing clusters with managed services like Amazon ECS, EKS, or AWS Batch, you can build resilient workloads that automatically scale across spot and on-demand instances. You could even take it one step further and build clusters that comprise only spot instances, mitigating risk by setting a high price limit and diversifying the instance types appropriately.
• 🧩 Reframe vendor lock-in concerns
  Avoiding cloud-native services to prevent vendor lock-in is a common refrain. But is the added abstraction really worth the trade-off? AWS services like DynamoDB or EventBridge can drastically simplify architectures and speed up delivery. Focus on designing for portability if your business genuinely requires it.

At Blackstack, we believe that truly transformative platform design requires a willingness to question the status quo. Don’t shy away from contrarian ideas—test them, validate them, and incorporate what works. The result might surprise you.