AWS fits the niche of "holy fuck my site is blowing up and I don't want it to crumble while I onboard new users or some event is going on".
You probably shouldn't use it for day to day ops but it's a really good spillway for extremely temporary & particularly for unexpected spikes of traffic.
Of course you could argue that AWS is particularly bad but I think this applies to most non-bare-metal instance cloud services.
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.
On the other hand some services from AWS are downright bad. For instance, Elastic Beanstalk is an operational nightmare. The one selling point is that it's easy to get started with, but from there it seems they rely on ops lock-in to pay the bills for this product. It's slow, clunky, and opaque. There are much better alternatives that don't force you to tradeoff usability and lock-in for initial ease of use.
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.
AWS is good but cause we are using sensitive data that can't be hosted anywhere else than a server owned by us , we have to rent a server and make sure we are the only ones that have access to it!
I tend to agree with this. AWS etc is nice if your scale is big enough that you need to run a big cloud of dozens of servers with complex interconnections for security etc. If a single plain old server with database etc on it will do the job fine, much better to stick with that.
IMHO, AWS is fabulous when your needs are a fast moving target. When you have something stable and have time to optimize for performance and cost, dedicated servers are better (cheaper and/or faster). There is no silver bullet.
IMHO many companies save time, money or both using AWS. Others fail miserably trying to do so.
I like very much the Amazon's AWS. I use them extensively. But apparently some folks goes a little crazy to adopt cloud services as final solution for every use case. They have no idea how much traffic a real high-end server fully loaded with memory and SSD disks should handle these days.
I completely agree. I sometimes take flack for "hating" AWS (and I do hate some aspects of it), but I think it's a great platform for incubating your service or proving a concept. Every company I've been at in the last five years has used AWS to an extent, despite operating their own datacenters. It's great for random analytics jobs or other tasks that aren't steady work tied to your core business.
It quickly starts to not make sense for services that have usage-driven growth patterns. AWS's billing model just doesn't work for this -- even though higher usage is discounted, it isn't enough to overcome the skew of the model. Companies that have deployed on AWS often realize this too late: their business starts to take off, and they get crushed under giant AWS bills that would be disproportionate even at 50% off list. It's much harder to move off once you've hit scale.
As bad as this article makes AWS sound, it's actually the reason you should go with AWS over say Azure or GCP; when AWS goes down, its owners actually feel the pain with you, Microsoft and Google run their own stuff elsewhere...
You probably shouldn't use it for day to day ops but it's a really good spillway for extremely temporary & particularly for unexpected spikes of traffic.
Of course you could argue that AWS is particularly bad but I think this applies to most non-bare-metal instance cloud services.
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