But to answer your questions:
1. It took around 1-2 months of experienced DevOps works (1-2 devops), this included testing and the actual switchover to new AWS infra.
2. We actually used outside contractors (actual k8s gurus) to do the work. But the decision was made in-house by myself. I'm no k8s guru, hell, I'm not even devops, but I have enough experience with the "big guys" so the choice was calculated from technical perspective, considering our growth needs and technical needs for now and for the future.
3. I haven't had any reasons to regret the decision, but I knew that before. I knew AWS offered the things we need and how to use them and what it's roughly going to cost, so this wasn't really a surprise. I did my due diligence.
4. Heroku bills were around 5$k/mon... AWS ones are in 5 digit, but it was expected because we started to use so much more services and resources than we did (or could) in Heroku. We also expanded into two new countries (one of the main reasons the switchover was done) so the costs are sadly not directly comparable. I can say that the new costs are in expected ranges and I'm happy with what we get for the money.
5. We run a eCommerce site with monthly GMV of 1m€+ and around 700k monthly unique visitors. Our stack is (per country) 3 nodejs services, PostgreSQL, redis and some frontend services. Main cost factors are the database(s) and CloudFront.
6. These decision have to made per use-case, per project and taking into consideration your actual infrastructure needs and budget limits. I don't think there isn't anything AWS can't do, but is the cheapest? Of course not. Hell, there have been plenty of topics on this very page about moving your infrastructure to your own bare metal and saving hundreds of thousands per month.
Think through what are the issues you are currently having (ie, for us it was the Herokus stack limitations, couldn't get http2, couldn't do custom monitoring / alerting, no access to LBs, no scalable DB hosting, the need to easily roll out new countries without having to do too much of manual work, weirdly high cost of some services, like redis for an example). If your problems are in the wallet, you need to consider this as your first priority and find a provider which will meet your technical needs with best price. All the big guys also have cost calculators available which will allow you to get an estimation on what you would be paying. Take time, this isn't an easy decision and it will affect you a lot in the future as well, so you don't want to get it wrong to be stuck with another set of issues.
But to answer your questions: 1. It took around 1-2 months of experienced DevOps works (1-2 devops), this included testing and the actual switchover to new AWS infra.
2. We actually used outside contractors (actual k8s gurus) to do the work. But the decision was made in-house by myself. I'm no k8s guru, hell, I'm not even devops, but I have enough experience with the "big guys" so the choice was calculated from technical perspective, considering our growth needs and technical needs for now and for the future.
3. I haven't had any reasons to regret the decision, but I knew that before. I knew AWS offered the things we need and how to use them and what it's roughly going to cost, so this wasn't really a surprise. I did my due diligence.
4. Heroku bills were around 5$k/mon... AWS ones are in 5 digit, but it was expected because we started to use so much more services and resources than we did (or could) in Heroku. We also expanded into two new countries (one of the main reasons the switchover was done) so the costs are sadly not directly comparable. I can say that the new costs are in expected ranges and I'm happy with what we get for the money.
5. We run a eCommerce site with monthly GMV of 1m€+ and around 700k monthly unique visitors. Our stack is (per country) 3 nodejs services, PostgreSQL, redis and some frontend services. Main cost factors are the database(s) and CloudFront.
6. These decision have to made per use-case, per project and taking into consideration your actual infrastructure needs and budget limits. I don't think there isn't anything AWS can't do, but is the cheapest? Of course not. Hell, there have been plenty of topics on this very page about moving your infrastructure to your own bare metal and saving hundreds of thousands per month.
Think through what are the issues you are currently having (ie, for us it was the Herokus stack limitations, couldn't get http2, couldn't do custom monitoring / alerting, no access to LBs, no scalable DB hosting, the need to easily roll out new countries without having to do too much of manual work, weirdly high cost of some services, like redis for an example). If your problems are in the wallet, you need to consider this as your first priority and find a provider which will meet your technical needs with best price. All the big guys also have cost calculators available which will allow you to get an estimation on what you would be paying. Take time, this isn't an easy decision and it will affect you a lot in the future as well, so you don't want to get it wrong to be stuck with another set of issues.