AWS is overrated. Most of the engineers and managers choose it because it's a safe choice for them. But in the long term the costs rise and you can't get away from it. I would even argue it's only for those who are afraid of command line.
The thing about AWS that is so impressive is not what it does. What AWS does was previously done by every single IT department at every company across the globe. What is impressive is the scale at which they do it. When you move to a world of every product hosting their own AWS equivalent, you've removed the challenge and impressiveness of AWS since you no longer need their massive scale, you only need enough to host your own product.
Setting up your own servers was not a bottleneck to the generation of internet companies that preceded AWS, and time has only made hardware cheaper, bandwidth more affordable, and OSS higher quality and more plentiful. It is easier than ever to host your own services, AWS just makes it cheaper up front thanks to their massive scale.
Point being, people aren't choosing AWS because AWS solves a problem they're incapable of solving, people are choosing AWS for pricing flexibility and faster time to market.
You're arguing with a position that no one is taking. I'm a cloud-to-butt guy, and have no love for AWS or cloud. I will probably always run my own servers because I spent a lot of my life learning how to do it. I'm annoyed that I'm telling you that as a way to try to trick you into reading the comments that you're replying to.
As someone who has put a considerable amount of resources moving things into cloud computing - I wanted to believe. But I have changed my mind.
Cloud computing scales the efficiencies, yes. It also scales the problems. And because of this, AWS is by several orders of magnitude the worst of my current hosts.
I have dedicated servers. No downtime in past year. I have a couple of cloud servers with rackspace. No downtime (although i don't recommend them). I have some VPSes with local providers. No downtime.
AWS? More than 24hrs downtime in the last year. Seriously, for someone trying to run web sites reliably - screw that. I'm not using AWS any more.
And don't even get me started on the apologists. "EBS slow as treacle? Well you should have been running a multi zone raid-20 redundant array! Duh!". "EC2 instances dying at random? Well you should architect and implement a multi-master failover intelligent grid!"
I used to be under some kind of crazy delusional spell that the above was correct and it was somehow my fault that I wasn't correctly adapting to AWS's numerous failings. Well, no more. Now I realise that I should just stick with the super reliable service I know and love from traditional operators. You need to programmatically grow and shrink your app server flock? Great, use AWS. For the other 99.999% of us - stick with what you were using before.
I totally agree, AWS is great if you are basically screwing in the racks yourself anyway (metaphorically speaking).
But for running a few hobbyist/amateur servers on it, it's absolutely horrifyingly complicated, especially when I'm not really a networking engineer, I like tinkering in the backend but not to that degree.
If you want just 1 or 2 mid-sized servers running 24x7 with traditional software on them like an RDMS, AWS is almost entirely the wrong choice.
A single AWS instance is not reliable, and isn't designed to be particularly reliable.
The real power of AWS isn't the ability to stop and start cheap instances quickly, it comes from services like S3 and Elastic Load Balancing, and SimpleDB.
If you build your systems on top of these extremely reliable services, you can achieve uptime much greater than you can achieve with 1 or 2 standalone servers (whether they've got the word "cloud" in their name or not), while not spending the massive amounts on high availability or fault tolerance that you previously had to pay.
Sure, and AWS is great but it's also not magic. It's unlikely you can literally just take the code that was running on a micro instance and scale it up to a big site in multiple zones without a lot of work.
Exactly plus at scale AWS doesn't do everything either, a sysadmin or at least consultants are still needed to navigate the gotchas and help with how to better provision the stack. AWS instances don't just scale themselves.
There is one specific case when I recommend AWS instead of dedicated servers and it's for customers who have widely varying traffic with predictable peaks. In that case having the flexibility afforded by cloud providers to increase the number of instances temporarily to deal with the peak makes sense.
IMO, this is seeing everything as a nail when you're a hammer.
AWS provides extreme flexibility. This really only becomes valuable once you hit a scale that you can optimize your infrastructure around the shape of your needs.
* Need some heavy workload to run in the most cost effective data center at the most cost effective time. Yep, AWS is great for that.
* Need a specialized GPU set. Yep, AWS is great for that.
* Need some crazy storage or memory setup. Yep, AWS is great for that.
For everything else, you should really consider using a PaaS with a good ol' Docker container.
Why in the world would you assume any off-the-shelf solution would serve a billion users?
Unlike many cloud providers AWS can be setup to serve a billion requests but you need to think that mess out from start to end. You can't setup an elb, turn on auto scale and then go out to lunch.
I'm not sure running on AWS instead of on your own server is actually going down a turtle. I run pretty much everything myself, but that is mostly dealing with complexity which isn't very enlightening. Might very well be that someone who uses a provider gets a better understanding of infrastructure design.
AWS is not the cloud. There are others. Please try something else. As someone with extensive professional experience with it day in and out, it is overrated.
Also, the cloud is someone else's computer. It is either AWS or GCP or something else. Move to what works, for you.
So there seem to be some major trade-offs between AWS and dedicated servers, the most obvious of which being that AWS seems much more difficult to configure, while it's easier and cheaper to scale.
Considering I only have experience with setting up dedicated servers, I was wondering if someone with experience setting both up could comment on whether the difficulties of using AWS outweigh the benefits.
Try doing this [0] with your dedicated servers in under 10 minutes.
And then try attaching highly-available scripts/cloud functions and dozens of different integrated functionality in seconds.
And then try setting up good Network ACL, firewalls, route tables, NAT gateways, load balancers with a few clicks.
... and people here are seriously suggesting that instead using AWS would equal a massive forced scaling operation. Lol.
[0]: https://i.ibb.co/TKmB9HX/image.png
reply