Where AWS fits — and where teams hit the wall
Where AWS fits well: teams with unusual or planet-scale needs: exotic managed services, a choice of regions on every continent, and the deepest compliance catalogue in the industry.
Where teams outgrow AWS: when a small team spends more time on IAM policies, VPCs, and per-service wiring than on the product, and a change has to be reviewed in five consoles instead of one diff.
What one AWS build actually assembles
A typical product on AWS is Lambda behind API Gateway, DynamoDB or RDS for data, S3 for files, OpenSearch when search appears, and Step Functions when steps need order — held together by IAM roles and policies. Each piece has its own console, API, limits, and pricing page.
None of that is declared in one place. The real architecture lives across consoles, Terraform or CloudFormation templates, and team memory, so reviewing a change means reviewing fragments and hoping the wiring was remembered correctly.
The same build as one KERNSTACK project
On KERNSTACK those pieces are resources in a single stack.json: functions for the handlers, tables and buckets for data and files, a search index declared over them, and a workflow when steps need order or a human approval between them.
- One project to plan, diff, and roll back instead of per-service consoles
- Agents draft changes in a sandbox against the project; people approve the plan
- The project runs in one European zone on our own bare metal, under one operator
Side-by-Side: AWS vs KERNSTACK
| Dimension | AWS | KERNSTACK (Software Lifecycle Cloud) |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of change | Separate services, each with its own console, API, and IAM | One project declared in stack.json |
| Compute | Lambda for handlers; EC2, ECS, or EKS when processes get long | Functions for handlers, container workers for long processes |
| Data and search | DynamoDB, RDS, S3, and OpenSearch wired together by hand | Tables, buckets, and search indexes in the same project graph |
| Bill | Dozens of per-service meters and pricing pages | One credit balance; compute at 0.01 credits per GiB-second |
| Operator | A US hyperscaler; a region is picked per service | Our own bare metal in Europe; one zone per project |
| Idle cost | Depends on each service; provisioned pieces bill around the clock | No compute charge while idle; storage at 0.04 credits per GB-hour |
Frequently asked questions
No. AWS offers hundreds of services and global regions that KERNSTACK does not try to copy. KERNSTACK covers the common product backend — compute, key-value data, files, search, inference, and workflows — as one declared project. If you need an exotic AWS service, stay on AWS for it.
No, and nothing claims otherwise. KERNSTACK imports nothing from AWS consoles or APIs. You re-declare the architecture in stack.json, rewrite handlers as functions or workers, and move data with ordinary exports — JSON out of DynamoDB, files out of S3.
Instead of a meter per service, a KERNSTACK project spends one credit balance: compute at 0.01 credits per GiB-second, storage at 0.04 credits per GB-hour, egress at 9.00 credits per GiB. There is no per-service pricing page to reconcile at month end.
Related capabilities, architectures, and comparisons
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