Huh? Shared server infrastructure? That's really what this sounds like. Welcome to web hosting in 1999 guys. Most of the point of AWS was that you have your own dedicated resources. Sure, this is a scaling solution, but revolutionary?
An honest question. Why do you guys use AWS instead of dedicated servers? It's terribly expensive in comparison, nowadays equally complex, scalability is not magic and you need proper configuration either way, plus now the outages become more and more common. Frankly, I see no reason.
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.
I see a lot of pessimism about AWS in this thread but its unfounded.
The sheer number of success stories on AWS at every scale is amazing. This guide demonstrates the diverse set of services AWS offers for customers from zero to Netflix. AWS is world-class engineering and operations that can be summoned by a single API call.
There might be ways to cut monthly costs on other providers, but many people forget to factor in your time to research, design stand up and operate software. I'd go all in on SQS, with all it's design quirks and potential costs, over rolling my own RabbitMQ cluster on Digital Ocean any day.
I'm biased, working full time on open source tools to help beginners on AWS at Convox (https://github.com/convox/rack), but frankly there's not a better time to build and scale your business on AWS. The platform is pure productivity with very little operational overhead.
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.
As someone that frequently criticises AWS i have to if there’s one thing it does right it’s security. Over-complex but way better than classic hosting.
AWS is great. We use it a work and I spun up extra server capacity for a once a year open studios event.
That being said as someone who's been in the Unix world for a while figuring out which AWS services to use is not obvious at all. It took me some time to figure out the alphabet soup of sevices and I was familiar from work. I ended up using "cloud formation" which builds you a server (LAMP or other) and optional database/loadbalances configuration. Its was that or selecting a LAMP ami (Amazon machine image). They have a lot of documentation but its hard to get an overview of what everything is (S3, elastic storage....) Plus configuring web server/ database servers for best performance can be non-trivial.
I get better speeds from our organizations cheap "shared hosting", during low loads. I was pretty sure the one week of very high loads would have crushed the shared host, thus AWS was perfect.
I dont agree. Its actually the exact same thing. Before AWS you did not time share servers. Servers would be idle for long amounts of time if the capacity requirements were spiky. You have the same situation here, but for work areas/meeting capabilities. Going from a single tenant fully leased capability to a shared workspace model allows for much higher utilization of the underlying assets.
The biggest thing that AWS offered in the beginning was extreme proximity to the backbone. Their services have grown by the dozens, and other hosting services have followed suit, but they remain (as far as I know) one of the closest points [ EDIT: without co-location ] you can put a VM to the backbone.
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