It's okay, we've all been guilty of taking shortcuts and mixing concerns in the name of speed or convenience.

But here's the thing - when you host non-critical features and services on the same resources as your core application, you're setting yourself up for some serious headaches down the road.

Not only can this approach lead to slower performance as your secondary components compete for resources, but it can also drive up your costs by forcing you to overprovision your main application just to keep those tag-along services running smoothly.

A much better strategy is to practice a clear separation of concerns, isolating non-essential functionality on its own infrastructure.

This could mean spinning up dedicated EC2 instances for certain features or even shifting them to serverless solutions like Lambda.

By decoupling these components from your core application, you'll be able to optimize your primary resources for maximum performance and scale your secondary services independently as needed.

Plus, you'll have a much easier time diagnosing issues and making changes when you don't have to worry about unintended side effects rippling across your entire system.

But I know this kind of refactoring can be easier said than done, especially in complex or legacy environments.

That's why I’m curious - how do you currently decide when to split off non-critical services, and what criteria do you use to prioritize that work?

Share your thought process and experiences in the comments, and let's discuss how we can all move towards leaner, more modular AWS architectures.